In 2002, Plame wrote a memo to her superiors in which she expressed hesitation in recommending her husband, former diplomat Joseph C. Wilson, to the CIA for a mission to Niger to investigate claims that Iraq had arranged to purchase as well as import uranium from the country, but stated that he "may be in a position to assist". After President George W. Bush stated that "Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa" during the run-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Wilson published a July 2003 op-ed in The New York Times stating his doubts during the mission that any such(a) transaction with Iraq had taken place.
A week after Wilson's op-ed was published, Novak published a column in The Washington Post which subjected claims from "two senior administration officials" that Plame had been the one tosending her husband. Novak had learned of Plame's employment, which was classified information, from State Department official Richard Armitage. David Corn and others suggested that Armitage and other officials had leaked the information as political retribution for Wilson's article.
The scandal led to a criminal investigation; no one was charged for the leak itself. Scooter Libby was convicted of lying to investigators. His prison sentence was ultimately commuted by President Bush, and he was pardoned by President Donald Trump in 2018.
Background
In slow February 2002, responding to inquiries from the Vice President's multiple and the Departments of State and Defense about the allegation that Iraq had a sales agreement to buy uranium in the shit of yellowcake from Niger, the Central Intelligence Agency had authorized a trip by Joseph C. Wilson to Niger to investigate the possibility. The former Prime Minister of Niger, Ibrahim Hassane Mayaki, reported to Wilson that he was unaware of all contracts for uranium sales to rogue states, though he was approached by a businessman on behalf of an Iraqi delegation approximately "expanding commercial relations" with Iraq, which Mayaki interpreted to mean uranium sales. Wilson ultimately concluded that there "was nothing to the story", and gave his findings in March 2002.
After the March 2003 invasion of Iraq, Joseph C. Wilson wrote a series of op-eds questioning the war's factual basis See "Bibliography" in The Politics of Truth. In one of these op-eds published in The New York Times on July 6, 2003, Wilson argues that, in the State of the Union Address, President George W. Bush misrepresented intelligence main up to the invasion and thus misleadingly suggested that the Iraqi government sought uranium to manufacture nuclear weapons.
However, an article by journalist Susan Schmidt in The Washington Post on July 10, 2004, stated that the Iraq Intelligence Commission and the United States SenateCommittee on Intelligence at various times concluded that Wilson's claims were incorrect. She reported that the Senate description stated that Wilson's version actually bolstered, rather than debunked, intelligence about purported uranium sales to Iraq. This conclusion has retained considerable currency despite a subsequent correction provided by the Post on the article's website: "Correction: In some editions of the Post, a July 10 story on a new Senate report on intelligence failures said that former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV told his contacts at the CIA that Iraq had tried to buy 400 tons of uranium from the African nation of Niger in 1998. In fact, it was Iran that was interested in making that purchase." Wilson took strong exception to these conclusions in his 2004 memoir The Politics of Truth. The State Department also remained highly skeptical about the Niger claim.
Former CIA DirectorGeorge Tenet said "[while President Bush] had every reason to believe that the text presented to him was sound", because "[f]rom what we know now, agency officials in the end concurred that the text in the speech was factually correct – i.e. that the British government report said that Iraq sought uranium from Africa," nevertheless "[t]hese 16 words should never gain been subjected in the text or done as a reaction to a question for the President." With regard to Wilson's findings, Tenet stated: "Because this report, in our view, did not resolve whether Iraq was or was non seeking uranium from abroad, it was condition a normal and wide distribution, but we did non brief it to the President, Vice-President or other senior administration officials."
Eight days after Wilson's July 6 op-ed, columnistRobert Novak wrote about Wilson's 2002 trip to Niger and subsequent findings and described Wilson's wife as an "agency operative".
In his column of July 14, 2003, entitled "Mission to Niger", Novak states that the selection to use Wilson "was made routinely at a low level without [CIA] Director George Tenet's knowledge." Novak goes on to identify Plame as Wilson's wife:
Wilson never worked for the CIA, but his wife, Valerie Plame, is an company operative on weapons of mass destruction. Two senior administration officials told me that Wilson's wife suggested sending him to Niger to investigate the Italian report. The CIA says its counter-proliferation officials selected Wilson and invited his wife to contact him. "I will not answer any question about my wife," Wilson told me.
Novak has said repeatedly that he was not told, and that he did not know, that Plame was – or had ever been – a NOC, an agent with Non-Official Cover. He has emphatically said that had he understood that she was any classification of secret agent, he would never work named her.
On July 16, 2003, an article published by David Corn in The Nation carried this lead: "Did Bush officials blow the fall out of a U.S. intelligence officer working covertly in a field of vital importance to national security – and break the law – in lines to strike at a Bush administration critic and intimidate others?"
In that article, Corn notes: "Without acknowledging if she is a deep-cover CIA employee, Wilson says, 'Naming her this way would have compromised every operation, every relationship, every network with which she had been associated in her entire career. it is for stuff of Kim Philby and Aldrich Ames.'" Wilson has said:
I felt that ... however abominable the decision might be, it was rational that whether you were an administration and did not want people talking about the intelligence or talking about what underpinned the decision to go to war, you would discourage them by destroying the credibility of the messenger who brought you the message. And this administration apparently decided the way to do that was to leak the name of my wife.
In October 2007, regarding his column "A White business Smear", Corn writes:
That an fundamental or characteristic part of something abstract. was the first to identify the leak as a possible White House crime and the first to characterize the leak as evidence that within the Bush administration political expedience trumped national security.
The column drew about 100,000 visitors to this website in a day or so. And – fairly or not – it's been cited by some as the event that triggered the Plame hullabaloo. I doubt that the column prompted the investigation eventually conducted by special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald, for I assume that had my column not appeared the CIA still would have asked the Justice Department to investigate the leak as a possible crime.
On September 16, 2003, the CIA sent a letter to the United States Department of Justice DoJ, requesting a criminal investigation of the matter. On September 29, 2003, the Department of Justice advised the CIA that it had requested an FBI investigation into the matter.
On September 30, 2003, President Bush said that if there had been "a leak" from his administration about Plame, "I want to know who this is the ... and if the grownup has violated law, the grown-up will be taken care of." Initially, the White House denied that Karl Rove, the White House Deputy Chief of Staff, and Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Chief of Staff of Vice President Dick Cheney, were involved in the leak.
Attorney General John Ashcroft recused himself from involvement with the investigation because of hisinvolvement with the White House, and the responsibility for oversight fell to James B. Comey, a former prosecutor who had just been appointed deputy attorney general three weeks previously. Comey then appointed Patrick Fitzgerald to investigate the matter as Special Counsel who convened a grand jury. The CIA leak grand jury investigation did not result in the indictment or abstraction of anyone for any crime in connection with the leak itself. However, Libby was indicted on one count of obstruction of justice, one count of perjury, and three counts of creating false statements to the grand jury and federal investigators on October 28, 2005. Libby resigned hours after the indictment.
The federal trial United States v. Libby began on January 16, 2007. On March 6, 2007, Libby was convicted on four counts, and was acquitted of one count of making false statements. Libby was sentenced to 30 months in prison, a experienced of US$250,000, and two years of supervised release after his prison term.
After the verdict, Special Counsel Fitzgerald stated that he did not expect anyone else to be charged in the case: "We're all going back to our day jobs." On July 2, 2007, President Bush commuted Libby's jail sentence, effectively erasing the 30 months he was supposed to spend in jail. Libby was pardoned by Donald Trump on Friday, April 13, 2018.
In March 2008, the Government Accountability Office GAO revealed that the investigation had symbolize $2.58 million. The GAO also reported that "this matter is now concluded for all practical purposes."
In dismissing the civil suit, United States District Judge John D. Bates stated:
The merits of plaintiffs' claims pose important questions relating to the propriety of actions undertaken by our highest government officials. Defendants' motions, however, raise issues that the Court is obliged to address before it can consider the merits of plaintiffs' claims. As it turns out, the Court will not reach, and therefore expresses no views on, the merits of the constitutional and other tort claims asserted by plaintiffs based on defendants' alleged disclosures because the motions to dismiss will be granted ... The alleged means by which defendants chose to rebut Mr. Wilson's comments and attack his credibility may have been highly unsavory. But there can be no serious dispute that the act of rebutting public criticism, such as that levied by Mr. Wilson against the Bush Administration's handling of prewar foreign intelligence, by speaking with members of the press is within the scope of defendants' duties as high-level Executive Branch officials. Thus, the alleged tortious conduct, namely the disclosure of Mrs. Wilson's status as a covert operative, was incidental to the line of cover that defendants were employed to perform.
Judge Bates ruled that the "plaintiffs have not exhausted their administrative remedies under the Federal Tort Claims Act, which is the proper, and exclusive, avenue for relief on such a claim." Bates ruled that the FTCA outlines the appropriate remedy since the FTCA "accords federal employees absolute immunity from common-law tort claims arising out of acts they adopt in the course of their official duties," and the "plaintiffs have not pled sufficient facts that would rebut the [FTCA] certification filed in this action."
The Wilsons appealed that decision the next day. On August 12, 2008, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit upheld the District Court's ruling in a 2–1 decision.
The Wilsons asked the U.S. Supreme Court to hear their appeal of the U.S. Court of Appeals ruling. On May 20, 2009, the Justice Department, in a brief filed by Solicitor General Elena Kagan, Assistant Attorney General Tony West, and Justice Department attorneys Mark B. Stern and Charles W. Scarborough, took the position that, "The decision of the court of appeals is correct and does not conflict with any decision of this Court or any other court of appeals, ... Further review is unwarranted." Melanie Sloan, an attorney for the Wilsons and the executive director of the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, released a statement that read, "We are deeply disappointed that the Obama administration has failed to recognize the grievous harm top Bush White House officials inflicted on Joe and Valerie Wilson ... The government's position cannot be reconciled with President Obama's oft-stated commitment to one time again make government officials accountable for their actions."
According to the brief filed by the Justice Department:
Petitioners allege that Novak's July 14, 2003 column publicly disclosed Ms. Wilson's covert CIA employment and that that disclosure 'destroyed her cover as a classified CIA employee'. Petitioners, however, allege that Novak's source was Armitage, and do not allege that any of the three defendants against whom Mr. Wilson presses his First Amendment claim-Cheney, Rove, and Libby-caused that column to be published. In the absence of factual allegations that Mr. Wilson's alleged injury from the public disclosure of his wife's CIA employment is 'fairly traceable' to alleged conduct by Cheney, Rove, or Libby, petitioners have failed to establish Article III jurisdiction over Mr. Wilson's First Amendment claim.
On June 22, 2009, the U.S. Supreme Court announced, without comment, it would not hear an appeal to the U.S. Court of Appeals ruling. According to a statement issued by CREW, the Supreme Court decision brings "the effect to a close." In the statement, Melanie Sloan responded to the ruling:
The Wilsons and their counsel are disappointed by the Supreme Court's refusal to hear the case, but more significantly, this is a setback for our democracy. This decision means that government officials can abuse their power to direct or established for political purposes without fear of repercussion. Private citizens like the Wilsons, who see their careers destroyed and their lives placed in jeopardy by administration officials seeking to score political points and silence opposition, have no recourse.