Plame out.(POLITICS)(Valerie Plame)

A GOOD summer scandal in Washington moves fast, with every day bringing additional details that make the story juicier. The sorry saga of Karl Rove's supposed exposure of covert CIA agent Valerie Plame does not fit the bill. The juice seems to drain from this story with each new report. New York Times columnist John Tierney calls the scandal "Nadagate." Even past his prime, Kevin Costner won't appear in a movie version.

Special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald continues to investigate, so it is premature to say that Rove has been vindicated. But what we have learned lowers the likelihood that Rove did anything criminal, or even wrong.

In the summer of 2003, former ambassador Joseph Wilson wrote an op-ed for the New York Times stating that his official fact-finding trip to Niger the previous year had uncovered no evidence that Saddam Hussein had acquired uranium from that country. The president had nevertheless claimed in his 2003 State of the Union address that British intelligence had learned that Hussein had sought uranium from Africa (a claim that British intelligence stands by, incidentally). The president, supposedly, had lied.

When Robert Novak reported that Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, was "[a CIA] operative on weapons of mass destruction" who had played a role in sending Wilson to Niger, the Bush administration's foes charged that the White House had outed her as a covert operative as a way to punish Wilson for causing it trouble. But we have now learned that a few days before Novak's column appeared, Karl Rove told Matthew Cooper of Time that Wilson's wife worked for the CIA. We have also learned that Novak talked to Rove about Plame, mentioning her name and her role in sending Wilson to Niger. Rove told Novak, "I heard that, too."

Based on what we know, it appears exceedingly unlikely that Rove committed any crime. The statute that criminalizes the disclosure of covert operatives' identities is narrowly worded. For Rove to have broken the law, he would have had to have known that Plame worked undercover and that the CIA was taking active steps to conceal her identity. In truth, the CIA seemed to be taking more active steps to undermine Bush's Iraq policy than to conceal Plame's identity. Indeed, according to one report the CIA had already inadvertently blown Plame's cover years earlier. So far, we have no ...