John Dean's Fitzmas prediction - doesn't make sense!

So John Dean - he of Watergate notoriety, and he who first suggested TraitorGate might be prosecutable under the Espionage Act - has a new diary up on FindLaw to discuss Fitzmas. (Yeah this has been diaried before. The diary went down the virtual drain faster than you can say Unindicted coconspirator, and people weren't picking up on what I want to discuss here.) He pretty much hedges his bets, but ends with this downer:

In short, I cannot imagine any of them being indicted, unless they were acting for reasons other than national security. Because national security is such a gray area of the law, come next week, I can see this entire investigation coming to a remarkable anti-climax, as Fitzgerald closes down his Washington Office and returns to Chicago.

Fitzmas to fizzle out? Maybe. But Dean's argument just doesn't make any sense to me. Follow me...

Dean is saying the WHIG cabal can get away with the Plame leak itself if they can claim to have acted believing they were protecting, not just their sorry assess, but national security interests. Of course even if that is the case they may still be indicted for obstruction of justice and possibly perjury:

In short, I think the frenzy is about to end -- and it will not go any further. Unless, of course, these folks were foolish enough to give false statements, perjure themselves or suborn perjury, or commit obstruction of justice. If they were so stupid, Patrick Fitzgerald must stay and clean house.

So here's Dean's argument for the national security excuse:

The leak of Valerie Plame Wilson's covert identity, if it was part of a plan to discredit her husband's report on his trip to Niger, is directly related to issues of "national security." After all, the Niger uranium claim was part of the basis for the Iraq War, and Joe Wilson's claim that it was bogus, and the President ought to have known as much, is intimately related to the politics of going to war - and also to national security in the sense of responding to genuine, and only genuine, threats to the United States.

<snip>

Did Cheney, Karl Rove, and Scooter Libby believe they had national security reasons to discredit Wilson's claims, and act accordingly?

<snip>

It is difficult to envision Patrick Fitzgerald prosecuting anyone, particularly Vice President Dick Cheney, who believed they were acting for reasons of national security. While hindsight may find their judgment was wrong, and there is no question their tactics were very heavy-handed and dangerous, I am not certain that they were acting from other than what they believed to be reasons of national security. They were selling a war they felt needed to be undertaken.

Okay, what's wrong here? Joe Wilson published his op-ed in the NYT on July 6, 2003. Novakula dished out the administration's payback a week later, on July 14. The original leaks are believed to have occurred between these two dates. There was no more war to be sold by this time - the deed was done. We were already in Baghdad, looking on rather sheepishly as people were throwing IEDs at us instead of the promised flowers. There is simply no way in hell Bushco could claim they had to do the hatchet job on Wilson so they could have their war to take out Saddam.

So, let's talk about this. Tell me what I am missing. Did John Dean really just have a brainfart? Or are there subtleties to his argument that elude me? He literally says the national security defense would rest on the argument that the war needed selling. Is it a credible line of defense to say that if people had come to believe the WMD claims were the pack of lies they really were, the ongoing war effort would have been undermined? And if so, does that mean any administration is justified to try and take out any critics during a time of war and break any laws in the course, long as they can claim their critics are an obstacle to the war effort? And even if Dean really just wasn't thinking here - could there be a national security defense other than the one he's suggesting? For example, could the WHIG goons argue they needed to protect the source of the Niger forgeries in the interest of national security?

What is disturbing to me here is that somebody so well-versed in both the law and national security matters, and purportedly so well connected in DC, could commit such a blunder. That's why I keep thinking there must be more here...