Bob Novak - whose article is said to have begun the Plame Game (nothing is further from the truth), writes today:

“Democrats had been slow to react to my column of July 14, 2003, which reported that former diplomat Joseph Wilson’s mission to Niger was suggested by his CIA employee wife, Valerie Plame Wilson. By September, when the Justice Department began investigating the CIA leak, Democrats smelled another Iran-contra affair or Watergate. They were wrong.

The Libby trial uncovered no plot hatched in the White House. The worst news Tuesday for firebrand Democrats was that Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald was going back to his “day job” (as U.S. attorney in Chicago). With no underlying crime even claimed, the only question was whether Libby had consciously and purposefully lied to FBI agents and the grand jury about how he learned of Mrs. Wilson’s identity.

While my column on Wilson’s mission triggered Libby’s misery, I played but a minor role in his trial. Subpoenaed by his defense team, I testified that I had phoned him in reporting the Wilson column and that he had said nothing about Wilson’s wife. Other journalists said the same thing under oath, but we apparently made no impression on the jury.

The trial provided no information whatsoever about Valerie Plame’s status at the CIA at the time I revealed her role in her husband’s mission. No hard evidence was produced that Libby was ever told she was undercover. Fitzgerald had argued that whether or not she was covert was not material to this trial, and U.S. District Judge Reggie B. Walton had so ruled. Yet in his closing argument, Fitzgerald referred to Mrs. Wilson’s secret status, and in answer to a reporter’s question after the verdict, he said she was “classified.”

In fact, her being classified — that is, that her work was a government secret — did not in itself meet the standard required for prosecution of the leaker (former deputy secretary of state Armitage) under the Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982. That statute limits prosecution to exposers of covert intelligence activities overseas, whose revelation would undermine U.S. intelligence. That is why Fitzgerald did not move against Armitage.”

Again, the travesty of this farce of an investigation that cost millions of tax payer dollars is that from the outset was that Novak was reporting a case of nepotism - in itself a violation of federal law - committed by Valerie Plame (and cohorts) in getting her husband the gig to Niger.

That of course wasn’t the extent of her crimes against the United States, but it was the catalyst for involved Democrats to move quickly to throw up the false charge of leaking a covert op. There may yet be an “Iran Contra”, but it won’t be affecting Republicans.