Reply #4: I had not heard of the role of Clifford May before

[Athame]

>from the article

The White House "off-the-record" campaign against Wilson was supplemented by a very loud "on-the-record" effort by prominent neo-conservatives and their news media, including the Wall Street Journal's editorial page, The Weekly Standard, and The National Review Online.

The last kicked it off on July 11 with an article by Clifford May, the president of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies (FDD) and the only person who was neither a journalist nor an administration official who claims to have known about Plame's relationship to Wilson before Novak reported about it.

While May, a former communications director for the National Republican Committee, did not identify Wilson's relationship with Plame, he included a litany of "talking points" about Wilson's objectivity. "He's a pro-Saudi, leftist partisan with an ax to grind," May declared. < end snip


This seems to spread the conspiracy beyond the established media to the think tank talking points and the Republican leadership and way beyond authorized need-to-know individuals.

Interesting that this point comes out in the Asia Times.