A doused Plame.(POLITICS)(Valerie Plame investigated)

THINK back, if you will, to the fall of 2003 and the question that consumed Washington: Who leaked the name of Valerie Plame to columnist Robert Novak? The question begat the CIA leak "scandal" and then the CIA leak investigation, which is now, under the direction of prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald, nearing the end of its third year.

But in recent weeks, the entire foundation of the investigation has crumbled. Or, to put it more accurately, we've learned that there never was a foundation for Fitzgerald's take-no-prisoners, send-reporters-to-jail probe.

The news that did such damage to the investigation comes in a new book, Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War, by Michael Isikoff and David Corn. Hubris reveals that the person who originally leaked to Novak was not an operative of the Bush White House, conspiring to expose Valerie Plame as a CIA agent in order somehow to "smear" her husband, the anti-Bush gadfly Joseph Wilson. Instead, the leaker was Richard Armitage, the former number two at the State Department and close confidant of former secretary of state Colin Powell.

The news lays waste to the notion that Vice President Dick Cheney, former Cheney chief of staff Lewis Libby, and top White House aide Karl Rove conspired to "out" Plame. Armitage and Powell were, you'll remember, determined antagonists of the Cheney crowd. The idea that they would be part of any Cheney conspiracy is ridiculous.

But perhaps the most disturbing part of the new revelations is that Justice Department investigators knew Armitage was the leaker by mid-October 2003. He told them himself. And Rove told them that he, too, had talked to Novak. So in that month, October ...