** Major Update At The End **
The breaking news regarding Richard Armitage as the original leak to the press regarding Valerie Plame’s CIA employment and role in sending big mouth Joe to Niger on a classified fact finding mission puts a whole new spin on the existing information out there. Tom Maguire’s post on the news led one observant person to quote this from the Libby indictment:

From page 4 of the indictment – Fitzgerald’s recital:

6. On or about June 11 or 12, 2003, the Under Secretary of State orally advised LIBBY in the White House that, in sum and substance, Wilson’s wife worked at the CIA and that State Department personnel were saying that Wilson’s wife was involved in the planning of his trip.

Emphasis mine. The State Department was at the meeting when Valerie introduced the idea of sending Joe to Niger. And this meeting there was nearly unanimous agreement sending Joe was a waste of time. Also, the State Department would have known all the early reporting linking Joe Wilson’s trip to debunking the Niger forgeries were a bunch of garbage – since the forgeries were not in the hands of people to debunk them for 6-8 months after Joe’s trip.

But in the end, the people who alerted the White House to the true role of Valerie was the State Department. If not for them, Libby might not have known Valerie’s role at the time of his meetings and discussions with reporters. Fitzgerald is truly a Mr. Magoo clown.

addendum: another interesting theory, though not as clean as the one above.

Update: Clarice Feldman asked me some good questions regarding this post and so I wanted to pass them along and do some wide-open speculation on this matter. And trust me, this is all wild speculation from here on out – with a foundation of logic thrown in to keep it from being a total fantasy. Here are the questions Clarice posed:

Why didn’t the DoS step out then and say so? Why did Armitage leave Libby and Rove twisting in the wind–refusing to let Woodward go to the SP until AFTER the Libby indictment? Why–though he apparently didn’t tell Fitz about Woodward, is Fitz trying to protect him, instead of charging him with obstruction?

Plus this comment when she agreed to let me play this speculation game:

If DoS knew the forgery story was a lie from Day 1, they deserve to be zinged for letting this farce go on.

First we need to establish some predicates.

First off, the Wilson-Plame gambit was an awkward attempt to get Bush that went bad quickly. It is imperative everyone recall the initial focus of the Kristof, Pincus and Wilson pieces that summer in 2003 after we were already in Iraq: ’Bush used forged documents to go to war’. Wilson had peddled the line he had the goods on Bush because he had gone to Niger in early 2002, debunking the ‘lead’ evidence for Saddam’s WMD threat: Saddam’s attempted purchase of yellowcake from Niger. The story was unraveling quickly and was a botched attempt by some to get Bush for using forged documents.

Now the second predicate. When faced with a major guffaw people tend to try and run from their mistake as quick as possible. In this case the perfect patsy was Joe Wilson, but for some reason Joe (and his cohorts) were protected from this obvious exit strategy. The only reason to plow forward is when surrender or defeat is the worse possible outcome. So something drove the people pushing this story to find a way forward. If the guffaw has legal consequences, admitting a ‘mistake’ is not going to get one out of the hot seat. So something was driving the Plame-Wilson group to continue to play their bad hand.

That leads us to the third predicate: to protect one’s self from investigation or scrutiny a big diversion is the only possible solution. The focus of the Wilson-Plame gambit rapidly went from ‘Bush using forgeries to take us to war’ (an offensive move against Bush) to “Someone ratted on Valerie Plame” (a defensive dodge). Thankfully for those on the Wilson-Plame team they could muster sufficient energy in key areas to make the transition in focus work.

Which leads me to my final predicate: Some people are willing participants because they share the risk, some are willing participants because they believe in the cause (get Bush), some are unwitting participants duped into action (Libby and Rove?) and some are drafted conscripts because they have as much to lose as those who needed to divert attention from the details of the original failed gambit.

These are simple assumptions which are very probably true. Now we can speculate where every one falls. Leading up to the Iraq War, in 2002, the CIA was towing the Bush-Cheney line that Iraq was a threat. There was dissention in the ranks, but not even Joe Wilson’s report from Niger do anything but bolster concern about Hussein, his WMD technology and his contacts with terrorists. The organization which was resisting this the most was the State Department, who wanted to retain the sanctions regime and who feared invasion. One of the groups in the CIA aligned with State was Valerie Plame’s group and their comrades on the outside (The VIPS).

Fast forward to December 2002 and we see a few things happening. First off, the Niger documents are being questioned, but strangely no one can find a copy. They are in a safe in the CIA section Valerie Plame works in and have been there since August when the CIA group received them. Ironically, had these documents been exposed at that time the march to war with Iraq would have been seriously hampered, but maybe not stopped. Timing would be everything. If presented too early Bush and his administration would have had plenty of time to regroup and respond. War had to start sometime in January – March so our soldiers could do what they had to before the desert’s became too tough to deal with.

So the best time to expose the forgeries to the public was after the UN failed to provide a resolution for invasion. That should take all the steam out of the pro invasion arguments. It is well known the Niger documents came up in a meeting with CIA and State Department folks earlier in 2002, after which they were mysteriously locked in the CIA safe until December.

Why would some at the Department of State be covering for Wilson-Plame and allowing this farce to continue for so long? What if their testimony was a plea agreement over the unlawful hiding of intelligence from our government decision makers? What if the timing of the Niger Forgeries was, in the end, too little too late and public opinion had solidified by the time the news came out (which is what had happened). There could be people who held information from our decision makers for what was, in the end, a lost cause.

So we now find a bungled effort to (a) use forged documents to derail the march to war being used to (b) do political damage to the man who took us to war: President Bush. But to do so meant hiding critical intelligence for a few months. Now we can see the Wilson-Plame gambit is truly high stakes poker. If the media ever turns its eye on the delay in the forgeries coming to light verses all the stories about Joe Wilson debunking them, a lot of people are in a world of hurt. So Joe and Valerie decide to sacrifice Val’s position to the media (which is much better than a criminal investigation).

But to work they need willing and forced (blackmailed) cohorts in the government. So they go to their State Department buds and explain how this whole scheme is about to come crashing down on all of them (recall all of Joe’s calls to the State Department?). Some higher ups, frustrated with Bush policies, might buy into ideas to simply tell the press all the State Department knows about Plame so as to not get involved in the pending media mess. These ideas could have been promulgated by career bureaucrats with much more to hide than association with Bush policies. So I can see Armitage talking to the press to disassociate from Bush’s policy fiasco, while others below him were trying to divert media attention to the White House. Who knows who did what, but if Fitzgerald is a believer in the cause, he has the power to look away from a lot of questionable behavior in order to get to what he thinks are the people who drove career bureaucrats into bad personal choices.

The State Department and some in the CIA need to keep the media focus off why information regarding Saddam’s nuclear intentions was first ‘lost’ in the CIA, then became public in the press in late 2002, and then even more became public when Wilson started leaking methods, sources, dates and information in spring 2003. All of these leaks of clearly classified information outweigh Valerie’s CIA job by an order of magnitude. People in Niger have been exposed as informants to the CIA. CIA front companies have been compromised, etc.

Why would anyone take something this far? Because to not take it this far would expose what happened and would be much worse for these people. Self preservation is a very strong motivator. Two bungled attempts to undermine Bush by an enclave of CIA and DoS employees is truly something to hide at all costs. Why did Fitzgerald go along? Who knows. The least worrisome answer is he is a dupe or a partisan hack. But the reason the State Department officials let it go this long is not a stretch. If the information regarding the validity of the Niger documents was withheld from senior officials for a few months, and then leaked to the press first – some heads would roll over that one. And not just lost jobs, but three free squares a day in a federal penitentiary would be the result.

Even those accidentally caught up would be too embarrassed to let it be known they allowed this to happen on their watch. In the intel world, managers are still responsible for the actions of their underlings.

If all of this is true, one has to wonder when those who were pulled into this might feel coming clean is now the only way out.

End of my wild speculation.