As the story has emerged so far, we have learned that White House staffers Karl Rove and Scooter Libby leaked the identity of a secret CIA agent to various reporters in the July 2003. Here at Pensito Review, we have also expressed our suspicion that former Bush flying monkey Ari Fleischer was also a leaker involved in the campaign to smear White House critic Joe Wilson by revealing the secret identity of his wife Valerie Plame.
Today the New York Times is reporting that, indeed, a third White House staffer gave up Plame’s identity to Washington Post reporter Walter Pincus:
In the same week in July 2003 in which Bush administration officials told a syndicated columnist and a Time magazine reporter that a C.I.A. officer had initiated her husband’s mission to Niger, an administration official provided a Washington Post reporter with a similar account.
The first two episodes, involving the columnist Robert D. Novak and the reporter Matthew Cooper, have become the subjects of intense scrutiny in recent weeks. But little attention has been paid to what The Post reporter, Walter Pincus, has recently described as a separate exchange on July 12, 2003.
In that exchange, Mr. Pincus says, “an administration official, who was talking to me confidentially about a matter involving alleged Iraqi nuclear activities, veered off the precise matter we were discussing and told me that the White House had not paid attention” to the trip to Niger by Joseph C. Wilson IV “because it was a boondoggle arranged by his wife, an analyst with the agency who was working on weapons of mass destruction.”
What is interesting – if that’s the right word – about this is the fact that Pincus is one of the two Washington Post reporters who are covering the Bush CIA Leak investigation. Here we have two MSM journos covering a story interviewing each other.
Curiouser and curiouser…
