CJR and Walter Pincus seem to be attempting to make the case Pincus was not privvy to Valerie Plame’s role with Joe Wilson’s trip – but end up with completely conflicting claims. Tom Maguire commented on the changing story across CJR and Vanity Fair, but I want to focus on an inconsistency in the CJR story itself:

On June 12, 2003, Pincus wrote about a former ambassador who had gone on a fact-finding mission to Niger in early 2002. Expanding on earlier coverage by Nicholas Kristof of The New York Times, Pincus reported that the ambassador had found no evidence that Iraq had tried to purchase uranium there.

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Three weeks later, on July 6, the ambassador revealed his identity in an op-ed essay in The New York Times and in an interview with Pincus and Richard Leiby in the Post. For better or worse, the world had been introduced to Joseph Wilson.
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Then, on July 12 — two days before the immortal column in which Robert Novak mentioned that Wilson’s wife, Valerie Plame, worked for the CIA — Pincus was on the phone with a person he describes as an administration official (and not Lewis Libby). They were talking about a somewhat different topic, and then the official began to complain about the attention that Wilson’s arguments had been receiving. Didn’t Pincus know, the official said, that Wilson’s wife was at the CIA, and that she had cooked up the Niger trip? “It was, ‘Why are you writing about it? It’s a boondoggle. She arranged it,’” Pincus recalls.

Note the dates I have highlighted. So he writes his story, talks to someone about Wilson’s wife (for the first time?) and then Wilson comes out with his story and Pincus comes out with one on Wilson as well. So for one, he knows about Valerie before his July 6 story that comes out in tandem with Joe’s editorial. But then there is this:

Pincus never wrote about Valerie Plame — in part, he says, because he already knew a fair amount about the origins of Wilson’s trip from various sources, including some in the CIA. He did not think it was true that Plame had arranged the trip; and even if that were so, he thought, it had little bearing on the merits or lack thereof of Wilson’s report. After Novak’s column ran, he says, “I talked to the agency people, and they said it wasn’t true.”

Hold on here. Is this a Dan Rather denial of reality? Joe Wilson would never have gone on the trip but for Valeries (a) volunteering him and (b) convincing the CIA to do it anyone after all the Intelligence groups briefed on the idea thought it a waste of time and redundant to ongoing efforts. This is all clear from the Senate Report. But what is stunning is he says he knew about Valerie in his reporting (June 12 and July 6) but did not hear about her until July 12??? How could he know about Valerie in his two earlier articles well before he first learned about her?

Also, the stories in May, June and July were not simply about Saddam attempting to buy yellowcake, they were about how Joe Wilson debunked the Niger forgeries – a big news item only 3 months old at the time. How is it Pincus missed all these salient reasons to not believe Wilson in his two reports regarding the Niger forgeries? These ‘alibis’ sound more like Pincus is rewriting history in his mind. He can’t even remember the focus of his own articles.

One more ‘slip of the tongue’ – Pincus had multiple sources and I bet some were the Wilson’s themselves:

Once his source had made it clear, through their attorneys, that it was okay for Pincus to talk, and after agreeing on some ground rules — including that the source’s name would not be disclosed publicly and that Fitzgerald would not explicitly ask Pincus to confirm the source’s identity — Pincus sat down to speak with Fitzgerald.

Hmm, ‘source’ could be the ‘family Wilson’, and their attornies. And even Pincus admits the trumped up crime idea was Joe Wilson’s and probably the Kerry campaign (Rand Beers):

but he has never been convinced by the argument that the leaks violated the law. “I don’t think it was a crime,” he says. “I think it got turned into a crime by the press, by Joe” — Wilson — “by the Democrats.

That is a huge revelation and confirms some of my earlier ‘speculation’ on how this all came about because the Niger forgery angle had unraveled on the Wilson’s and their cohorts (Beers and Kerry?) and they used the outing of Plame to divert attention from the Niger forgery angle because it was leading to a troublesome revelation.