AintNoBadDude

|link| Posted 4:17 AM by Brian Linse

Will Bush Visit His Pals In Prison?

The Washington Post has broken the Valerie Plame leak story wide open. CalPundit has comments, as do Josh Marshall and Mark Kleiman, with more to come, I suspect, in the next 24 hours. Conservo-blogger John Cole is calling for a perp walk if this turns out to be true, and it sure looks like several senior White House officials will be facing a Grand Jury. It should be an interesting Sunday talk cycle if Russert et al manage to wake the fuck up and jump on this story.

The bombshell comes from a "senior administration official" -- which is reporter-speak in this case for a CIA administration source -- that tells the Post that two "top White House officials" called reporters to leak Plame's status as a covert CIA operative as a pure revenge play designed to discredit her husband, Joseph Wilson, who had been critical of the White House using the Niger uranium claim in the SOTU speech.

Jeebus.

If there were, in fact, two White House officials making calls, then that eliminates the possibility of a rogue player acting on his or her own, and almost surely means that there was a conspiracy within the Bush Administration to leak the information. Given the common knowledge of how the Bush White House works, I think it is safe to assume that if Karl Rove was not one of the two people making the calls, he likely knew about them and perhaps instigated them.

BadDude has a Franklin that says Rove goes down on this. Any takers?

UPDATE: Kevin Drum has a list of possible perps, but I think we can scratch Condi because of this statement from FOX News Sunday:

" I know nothing of any such White House effort to reveal any of this [Plame's CIA status], and it certainly would not be the way that the president would expect his White House to operate."

Too many people know the identities of the two "top White House" leakers for Condi to make this statement if she were one of them. She is, of course, lying when she says she "knows nothing", for she surely must now know who made the calls to reporters. If she doesn't, then our national security is in the hands of an incompetent.

Josh Marshall and Atrios are all over this story. Open two browsers and keep checking in. InstaPundit also has some links to commentary by others.

MO' UPDATE: Who said this?

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.

If you guessed former president George H.W. Bush, you are right.

How proud he must be of junior's Administration.

LATE SUNDAY: Howard Kurtz is an idiot.