David Corn has written a piece titled “Fred Thompson doesn’t know what he’s talking about.” One way that Thompson is setting himself apart from the crowd (besides that whole Law & Order thing) is his firm opinion of what should be done regarding Scooter Libby. Says Corn:
On Fox News, Fred Thompson showed no reticence. He called the sentence a shocking injustice. And he went on a tear:
You got a situation here where they knew shortly after they started this fiasco that no crime had been committed. What they were looking at didn’t constitute a crime, because of the status of Valerie Plame. She wasn’t a covered person under the statute. Then they found out that he didn’t — Scooter Libby didn’t leak her name. Richard Armitage over at the State Department did that, but they still kept digging and digging, because the press expected the special prosecutor to come up with somebody in the Bush administration.
The Justice Department should never have appointed special counsel. They were taking criticism and heat from the press and Capitol Hill. And they had to do something, they felt like, so they caved, appointed a special counsel. And he spent a year and a half digging and digging, and he came up with a process crime allegation….
They picked him out to bring the burden of this entire political witch hunt on him, this single individual, and prosecuted him.
Where to begin? Thompson’s thumbnail description is completely cracked. He repeated the rightwing mantra that Valerie Wilson was not covered by the Intelligence Identities Protection Act. That’s not true. I’ve argued this point over and over with conservatives who refuse to listen. As Michael Isikoff and I disclosed in Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War, Valerie Wilson was the operations chief of the Joint Task Force on Iraq, a unit within the Counterproliferation Division of the CIA’s clandestine operations directorate. She was working undercover, trying to collect intelligence on Iraq’s suspected WMD programs, and she had traveled abroad on undercover missions in the five years before she was outed in a Robert Novak column. Under the terms of the IIPA, she qualified as a covert officer. As Fitzgerald declared in a recent court filing, “It was clear from very early in the investigation that Ms. Wilson qualified under the relevant statute [the Intelligence Identities Protection Act] as a covert agent whose identity had been disclosed by public officials, including Mr. Libby, to the press.” Read more…
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