The Neo-Malthusian Tribulation

A couple of significant recent articles by Murray Waas and Walter Pincus indicate that indictments are looming for high administration officials Karl Rove and Scooter Libby in connection with the Plame investigation.

In discussing the Waas article, Congressman John Conyers asks: "Why Won't Scooter Libby Grant Judith Miller a Personal Waiver?"

"Libby met with Judith Miller on July 8, 2003 and discussed CIA operative Valerie Plame. This meeting, six days before the publication of Robert Novak's infamous column outing Mrs. Joe Wilson (Valerie Plame), is a "central focus" of the Fitzgerald investigation.

The kicker: "Sources close to the investigation, and private attorneys representing clients embroiled in the federal probe, said that Libby's failure to produce a personal waiver may have played a significant role in Miller's decision not to testify about her conversations with Libby, including the one on July 8, 2003."

Kevin Drum gives the "nickel version" of the theory deduced from Pincus's Washington Post article by Armando at DailyKos.

"In July 2003, Karl Rove and Scooter Libby told reporters that Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, had been responsible for sending him on his fact finding trip to Niger the previous year.

However, virtually every source says that's not true. The CIA maintains that senior officials in the counterproliferation division chose Wilson, and that Plame's only role was to write a memo about his credentials that they asked her to write.

In fact, as of July 2003, there was only one source that said the trip was Plame's idea: the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research, which had written a memo in June about the affair.

Therefore, that State Department memo must have been Rove and Libby's source of information about Plame — and if that's the case, it's bad news for the White House since the memo clearly marked the information about Plame as classified. (Further tidbit: Is it possible that this memo was what Rove was talking about when he told Time's Matt Cooper that "material was going to be declassified in the coming days that would cast doubt on Wilson's mission"?)"