Valerie Plame was the CIA agent outed by the George W. Bush White House after her husband, Joe Wilson, discredited White House claims being used to justify the 2003 invasion of Iraq. She writes that the Trump pardon of Scooter Libby for that act will have lasting consequences.
I doubt it had much to do with Libby. Or me, a central figure in the case. Or justice. Trump’s critics might be forgiven for thinking that the pardon was more about sending an explicit message to a select audience of Paul Manafort, Michael Flynn and Michael Cohen, among others, that if they are convicted of a crime against national security in service to Trump, their loyalty will be rewarded with clemency. [...]
“Outing” a covert operative imperils many. It risks not only the officer’s safety — there are many who want a CIA officer dead — but the entire network of foreign assets being run by the officer. In some cases, the assets’ lives and even those of their families may be jeopardized. The danger is real. For example, I handled an asset who was a prominent nuclear scientist in a rogue country. He provided the CIA with invaluable intelligence on how his regime went about procuring nuclear-weapons components. If his government had known he was meeting with me in third countries and passing critical information, he would have been killed. No question. I don’t know the fate of all my assets, but I do know that anyone who thought that my CIA identity was “well known around Washington” (as the columnist Robert Novak wrote in The Washington Post in 2003) and that I did not have covert operational responsibilities in the lead-up to the Iraq War is dead wrong.
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On today’s Kagro in the Morning show, Greg Dworkin & Joan McCarter help round up the latest Cohen fallout, Gop leadership disarray, and procedural hurdles to bills protecting Mueller. Without the lenient rules of the Congressional Review Act to play with, the GOP turns to… changing the rules.
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