A Traitor’s Best Friend

Via Atrios:

Robert Novak is completely immoral and intellectually bankrupt. I had heard him make a statement on CNN regarding the issue but never actually read his column about his relationship with convicted spy Robert Hanssen

His apparent confusion as to the integrity of the man whom he reluctantly revealed as a souce after he had pled guilty to spying and blowing the covers of dozens of CIA assets (resulting in many deaths) is downright astounding.

According to Novak, (whom it seems is every treasonous Republican’s favorite reporter) the fact that Hanssen had spied for more than 30 years, had collected more than a million dollars in “fees” from the KGB and had been personally responsible for many deaths and compromises of national security, was not enough to fully convince him

that he wasn’t acting out of patriotism when he leaked to Novak that Janet Reno was endangering spies in China.

Unanswerable questions are pondered. During the lengthy interim when he was not betraying his country, could Hanssen have felt some genuine concern about the security of U.S. assets in China if they fell into the hands of the attorney general? Could he have experienced a sudden change of heart after disclosing the identity of U.S. assets in Russia?

Or, was he merely using me to undermine Reno — and his boss, FBI Director Louis Freeh, as well? …

Robert Hanssen is an enigma and will remain so at least until he reveals himself. The speculation that he is purely the embodiment of evil tends to be undermined by the validity of his report about Ray Wickman. He really may have been living a double-life, one as a patriotic, religious American and the other as spy of the century. That sounds fanciful, but any other explanation fails.

No, there actually is another explanation. The explanation is that Robert Hanssen, traitor and scumbag, was a sexually repressed, greedy, mentally unbalanced right wing Republican who would sell out his fellows, his family and his country for money and ego gratification. Anyone who believes that this is not the embodiment of evil has no business being on the receiving end of ANY sensitive information.

It is monumentally insulting that Novak would even ponder the possibility that a man like Hanssen remained a good patriotic American when he accused Janet Reno of being a traitor. It’s simply unbelievable.

Establishment Washington needs to start taking a good hard look at Novak’s work over the last 40 years. It seems he has often been a willing tool of those who like to commit treason. Perhaps the “pattern” required to establish a journalist’s culpability under the law is more obvious than we think.