This is REAL treason Ann Coulter: Someone is going to Jail or worse!

The Justice Department has opened a preliminary inquiry into whether a Bush Administration official illegally revealed the identity of a CIA employee whose husband criticized the Administration's handling of intelligence on Iraq, TIME has learned. The probe will determine whether to order a full-fledged FBI investigation.

The CIA triggered the Justice inquiry with a memo saying that there may have been an unauthorized disclosure about the wife of Joe Wilson, a former U.S. ambassador. Columnist Robert Novak wrote in July that Wilson's wife was a CIA "operative" who suggested that he be sent to Niger to investigate intelligence that Saddam Hussein was trying to buy a large volume of Niger's yellowcake uranium to build a nuclear weapon.

The idea that--first of all, irrespective of whether my wife is or is not what Novak alleged, therefore, there was no personal involvement. I think it's important to understand about this allegation, a couple of things. One: when they're talking about "senior administration officials", they're talking about the White House. The CIA does not "out" its own. It just doesn't do that. Secondly, I think that it's important to understand that if, in fact, she is what was alleged, then it is a violation of the Intelligence Agents Identification Act of 1982, which is a felony, and the process of investigating it goes through, I believe, the CIA and then to Justice and to the FBI, and that's if she is, in fact, what they said.

After the column ran, the CIA began a damage assessment of whether any foreign contacts Plame had made over the years, or projects she had worked on, had been compromised. CIA officials working undercover often pass themselves off as members of the diplomatic corps or, if they are in deeper cover, called "nonofficial cover," as business members or other types of employees not associated with the U.S. government. Sometimes they use their real names or continue to use false names until they have gone through a lengthy, secretive process to reemerge as "overt" employees no longer undercover.

He said that if Novak's account is accurate, the leak was part of "a deliberate attempt on the part of the White House to intimidate others and make them think twice about coming forward."

Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.), who has been pushing the FBI to investigate the disclosure, said it "not only put an agent's life in danger, but many of that agent's sources and contacts."

Okay, no question: the Washington Post has the story about the Wilson/Plame scandal. This story, frankly, blows the whole thing wide open.

The Post got one "senior administration official" to concede that "two top White House officials" disclosed Plame's identity to at least six journalists.

Here are the five bombshell grafs in their entirety ...

A senior administration official said two top White House officials called at least six Washington journalists and revealed the identity and occupation of Wilson's wife. That was shortly after Wilson revealed in July that the CIA had sent him to Niger last year to look into the uranium claim and that he had found no evidence to back up the charge. Wilson's account eventually touched off a controversy over Bush's use of intelligence as he made the case for attacking Iraq.

"Clearly, it was meant purely and simply for revenge," the senior official said of the alleged leak.

Sources familiar with the conversations said the leakers' allegation was that Wilson had benefited from nepotism because the Niger mission had been his wife's idea. Wilson said in an interview yesterday that a reporter had told him that the leaker said, "The real issue is Wilson and his wife."

The official would not name the leakers for the record and would not name the journalists. The official said he had no indication that Bush knew about the calls. Columnist Robert Novak published the agent's name in a July column about Wilson's mission.

It is rare for one Bush administration official to turn on another. Asked about the motive for describing the leaks, the senior official said the leaks were "wrong and a huge miscalculation, because they were irrelevant and did nothing to diminish Wilson's credibility."
How about just wrong, and leave out that they were ineffective?

In any case, this is truly a bombshell and for the first time I suspect someone may actually lose their job over this -- though loyalty being what it is to the prez I still have my doubts. Clearly, the White House knows who those two people are. And I don't see how -- in a climate of media feeding frenzy -- it will be possible to keep their identites a secret. And once their identities are known ...

ust so I understand, the allegation is that because this guy was challenging that Iraq-Africa nuclear scenario, the White House endangered his wife by letting it be known that she was working for the CIA. It's like a dirty tricks operation to intimidate people into playing along. This could be quite a scandal, and it links back to the whole lying-to-start-a-war problem.

Just flipped on the TV and found Fox News interviewing Condi Rice. As it happened, a minute or two after I tuned in Brit Hume asked Rice about the Wilson/Plame matter. Let's be honest, I didn't expect Hume and Tony Snow to be the most hard-hitting questioners on this issue. But you couldn't watch the exchange without seeing how big a deal this is. First of all, Rice denied nothing. It was, in so many words, all no comments. More telling I thought was how visibly rattled Rice seemed. She seemed to have a hard time getting her words out. Her breathing was halting.

To their credit, Hume and Snow followed up by noting that this was a sufficiently serious charge that a bland 'no comment' didn't really cut it. But all Rice could do was awkwardly say that she wasn't going to answer questions because it's in the Justice Department's hands, they're investigating, and that this is the kind of thing that the president doesn't accept. What I took from this is that the White House was stunned by this rapid escalation of events. And they haven't figured out what to do. Or, if they have, they haven't let Condi in on it yet.

When your best argument is 'the Justice Department is investigating us and we hope they get to the bottom of it', you're in a jam.

We need more human intelligence. That means we need more protection for the methods we use to gather intelligence and more protection for our sources, particularly our human sources, people that are risking their lives for their country. Even though I'm a tranquil guy now at this stage of my life, I have nothing but contempt and anger for those who betray the trust by exposing the name of our sources. They are, in my view, the most insidious, of traitors.

George H.W. Bush
April 16th, 1999
Dedication Speech
George Bush Center for Intelligence