The E-Mail (Non) Scandal Versus Valerie Plame Scandal - Where were the Republicans?
The Hillary Clinton e-mail scandal is about a non-technical person not following a company e-mail policy. Of course, there is this huge disconnect between not following proper e-mail protocol versus the alleged criminal culpability of her actions. This was most evident during the recent hearings where it was pointed out that the House Chairmen himself listed a private e-mail address on his business card. Even now, in 2016, company e-mail policies are very often flagrantly disregarded. Yet, it is rare that we attribute malicious or dishonest intent to such lapses.
In sharp contrast, consider the outing of Valerie Plame by the Bush administration. This was an intentional leak made in retaliation for the comments by Joseph Wilson. Yet, Republicans widely dismissed this intentional breach of national security. This was not simply failing to observe proper e-mail protocols. This was not even carelessness in the handling of classified information. The Bush administration leaked sensitive information for political ends. Yet, where were the calls to withdraw the security clearance of key Bush administration figures?
This is what I mean about the normalization and false equivalency pushed by the media. The so-called e-mail scandal relates to not following proper e-mail security policies. The Valerie Plame affair involved the intentional, retaliatory disclosure of national security information.
https://www.thenation.com/article/plamegate-finale-we-were-right-they-were-wrong/
From the start, neocons and conservative backers of the war dismissed the Plame leak and subsequent scandal as a big nothing. Some even claimed that somehow former Ambassador Joseph Wilson and I had cooked up the episode to ensnare the White House. (Oh, to be so devilishly clever–and to be so competent.) But these attempts to belittle the affair (and to belittle Valerie Wilson) were based on nothing but baseless spin. As was–no coincidence–the Iraq war. In fact, the Wilson imbroglio was something of a proxy war for the debate over the war itself. In the summer of 2003, when the Plame affair broke, those in and out of government who had misled the nation into the war saw the need to spin their way out of the Wilson controversy in order to protect the false sales pitch they had used to win public support for the invasion of Iraq.
First they attacked Joe Wilson when he disclosed that he had gone to Niger in February 2002 for the CIA and had reported back that the allegation Saddam Hussein had been uranium-shopping there was highly dubious. Then when Valerie Wilson’s CIA identity was exposed during the get-Wilson campaign, they pooh-poohed the leak. They subsequently spent years doing so. Here’s a brief list of Plame attacks I’ve published before:
* On September 29, 2003, former Republican Party spokesman Clifford May wrote that the July 14, 2003 Robert Novak column that disclosed Valerie Wilson’s CIA connection “wasn’t news to me. I had been told that–but not by anyone working in the White House. Rather, I learned it from someone who formerly worked in the government and he mentioned it in an offhand manner, leading me to infer it was something that insiders were well aware of.”
* On September 30, 2003, National Review writer Jonah Goldberg huffed, “Wilson’s wife is a desk jockey and much of the Washington cocktail circuit knew that already.”
* On October 1, 2003, Novak wrote, “How big a secret was it? It was well known around Washington that Wilson’s wife worked for the CIA….[A]n unofficial source at the agency says she has been an analyst, not in covert operations.”
* On July 17, 2005, Republican Representative Roy Blunt, then the House majority leader, said on Face the Nation, “This was a job that the ambassador’s wife had that she went to every day. It was a desk job. I think many people in Washington understood that her employment was at the CIA, and she went to that office every day.”
* On February 18, 2007, as the Libby trial was under way, Republican lawyer/operative Victoria Toensing asserted in The Washington Post, “Plame was not covert.”
* In his recently published memoirs, Novak wrote of Valerie Wilson, “She was not involved in clandestine activities. Instead, each day she went to CIA headquarters in Langley where she worked on arms proliferation.”
A year ago, in our book, Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War, Michael Isikoff and I disclosed for the first time that Valerie Wilson was operations chief at the Joint Task Force on Iraq of the Counterproliferation Division of the CIA’s clandestine operations directorate. She was no paper-pusher or analyst, as Novak and others had said. She was in charge of covert operations on a critical front. (Isikoff and I detailed some of her work in the book.) As part of her job, she traveled overseas under cover. CBS News recently reported that it had confirmed she had also worked on operations designed to prevent Iran from obtaining or developing nuclear weapons. Ironic? Ask Dick Cheney.
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