Occam’s Leak

by digby

Emptywheel at the Last Hurrah and Jane and ReddHedd at Firedoglake both have lengthy and interesting speculation on Woodward for the Plame obsessed among you.

I would only add that this morning it sounded as if the courtiers, as represented on the Stephanopoulos circle jerk and Newsweak, have decided that the source is Richard Armitage.

If this is so (and it may very well be — Armitage was a major souce for “Plan of Attack”) it doesn’t impact Libby’s legal case but it changes the focus of the narrative a bit. We have been operating under the assumption that the leak was coordinated directly out of Cheney’s office, with some help from the WHIG, which included Karl Rove and Stephen Hadley. If Armitage was telling Woodward about Plame as “idle gossip” in a conversation at the State Department, the Bush apologists (and the elite media — for different reasons) will call that coordinated leak scenario into question.

If it does turn out to be Armitage, regardless of the political implications, I think that it’s actually quite likely that the Woodward leak probably happened just as he describes it — passing on idle gossip. Via Talk Left’s excellent rundown of the Armitage theory, we have an article from The LA Times last August that discusses Armitage’s access to the information:

After a June 12 Washington Post story made reference to the Niger uranium inquiry, Armitage asked intelligence officers in the State Department for more information. He was forwarded a copy of a memo classified “Secret” that included a description of Wilson’s trip for the CIA, his findings, a brief description of the origin of the trip and a reference to “Wilson’s wife.”

The memo was kept in a safe at the State Department along with notes from an analyst who attended the CIA meeting at which Wilson was suggested for the Niger assignment. Those with top security clearance at State, like their counterparts in the White House, had been trained in the rules about classified information. They could not be shared with anyone who did not have the same clearance.

Less than a month later, Wilson went public with his charges. The next day, July 7, this memo and the notes were removed from the safe and forwarded to Powell via a secure fax line to Air Force One. Powell was on the way to Africa with the president, and his aides knew the secretary would be getting questions.

Woodward says he had the conversation with his source in mid-June, so it fits that Armitage might have recently read this memo and shared the insider info with Woodward. The Bush administration observed no rules, as far as I can tell, about classified information when it came to Bob Woodward. It explains why Woodward would have been so adament about this not being anything more than idle gossip, because that’s exactly how he heard it from his pal Dick. According to the article, that Armitage memo didn’t leave the safe until Wilson went public so it could have easily been just a delicious tittilating tidbit Armitage threw out there, not realizing where this story was going. (Powerful administration sources discussing classified matters under the caveat that they must never reveal the information is apparently so common in DC now that reporters don’t even understand what’s wrong with it.)

If my simple scenario is true, then the wingnuts will claim that it proves there was no coordinated leak. If others in the Bush administration were gossiping about this then it wasn’t a smear job at all, just simple socializing around the water cooler. This is, of course, nonsense. It would only mean that Woodward and Armitage were socializing around the water cooler (on deep backround.) We already know that Libby and Rove, on the other hand, were rabid dogs working overtime to discredit the CIA (Libby) and destroy “a Democrat” (Rove )through underhanded leaks and then lying about it under oath. One doesn’t necessarily affect the other.

If Armitage was Novak’s source as well, which Newsweak claims, then Occam’s Leak doesn’t apply. It’s not believable that Armitage would have casually gossipped about this to both reporters. I’ll withhold judgment until I see any evidence besides Isikoff’s observation that Armitage isn’t a “partisan gunsliger” to back that up.

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