Novak has been putting quite a punctuation mark on the Blame Game and quite a dunce hat on prosecutor Fitzgerald with all his revelations. On FOX News’ Special Report with Brit Hume (which I missed) he lays out some interesting points. First off we see the indications that it was Armitage and the State Department who leaked to Novak in the course of discussing foreign policy in general, and Wilson’s Niger trip in particular:

NOVAK: In person. He gave me an interview. An hour-long interview, nobody else present. There is countervailing rule that you know is not to be attributed to me. We didn’t sit down and sign a contract, but you knew it was because he was very candid. We talked about a lot of things including Joe Wilson’s mission to Niger, which he was making a great deal of — paying a lot of attention to as a reason why the president misstated the need to go intervene in Iraq.

…

And in the course of that interview he I said, “Why would they send Joe Wilson to Niger? Why would the CIA send him there? He’s not a CIA agent, he is not anybody who knows Niger that well; he served there a long time ago.”

He said his wife worked in the Office of Nuclear Proliferation in the CIA and she suggested he go.

…

NOVAK: I think the conversation started about other things. About general foreign policy and administration policy and this was just a few days after the Joe Wilson column had appeared and I started to ask him about the Joe Wilson column, asked some questions about it, which he
answered to me and which I assumed was a background basis and then he volunteered this information about Mrs. Wilson.

Clearly the topics suggest someone in State as opposed to someplace else. I think it is time for Richard Armitage to come clean and remove the stain his inadvertant comment left on Rove and Libby. Armitage owes these men that much. Armitage also needs to explain how he found out and whether all this was provided by long time Wilson bud Marc Grossman who worked for Armitage. I doubt it, but I would like to know for sure.

It is also clear there was no effort on the administration’s side to get the news out about Plame. Armitage clearly did not mean to leak anything classified:

NOVAK: I don’t believe there was a conscious effort to manipulate me. As I said in the column that ran today, subsequent to the announcement of the federal investigation of this, a third party who is close to the source called me up and said that this source believes that he inadvertently gave me information that was classified about Mrs. Wilson.

Whether it was inadvertent or not, I don’t believe that it was a conscious leak. He always said a couple times in the column, I said, this is not a political gunslinger, this official was not known as somebody who did a lot of political manipulations. He is more of a substantive person.

And Karl Rove did not (a) call Novak or (b) bring up the matter of Wilson or Plame – Novak initiated both:

NOVAK: I called Rove.

HUME: And did you call for the purpose of getting this confirmed or did this come up in passing?

NOVAK: I called him for several reasons. I wanted to talk about the column I was writing about the mission to Niger. Almost all of my conversations with Rove were not for attribution and in the course of that I told him. I asked him about Wilson’s wife at the CIA, working with the CIA and initiating this visit and as I remember the conversation very distinctly, Karl said to me, “Yes, I know that, too.”

In fact, the only person who called Novak to influence the story was the CIA spokesman Bill Harlow who gave out more details!

blockquote>NOVAK: I called him [Harlow], he said, “I’ll get back to you” and he talked to somebody — I just guessed he talked to the CIA director, George Tenet, I had no idea if that’s true. He came back to me and he told me yes, she worked for the CIA in the Office of Weapons of Mass Destruction and he told me that Mrs. Wilson did not suggest the mission by her husband, but she was asked to get him to do it by other people in the CIA.

That subsequently was repudiated by a report by the Senate
Intelligence Committee, which … Said she suggested it and there were no Democratic dissenters.

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But as a matter of fact, her life wasn’t in danger and he said it is very unlikely she would ever go to Europe. That meant to me that she was not doing any kind of work as an agent in Europe. So, all he was saying is it might be embarrassing to her if she went on a vacation trip with her husband if she was identified as a CIA person and that wasn’t a good enough reason for keeping her name out.

Emphasis mine. I think it is clear Harlow called Plame and she is the one who told him the lie about her role in Joe’s trip – which she and Joe Wilson stood by until the Senate uncovered her memo recommending Joe. In fact, we know this (2002) to be the second time she had sent Joe to Niger for the CIA. The first time was in 1999. So there is only one person who would try and deny the obvious: Plame. Harlow relayed a lie and is now trying to stand by it.

Which brings us around to Fitzgerald who was supposed to investigate who leaked her name and was a crime involved. Since Armitage did not know Plame’s status when he told Novak, the leak was unintentional (not to mention Plame was not a overseas agent since the twins were born in 2000). It is also clear Plame did not lie low in DC since Novak found her so easily. Therefore this investigation should have shutdown right then and there. But Fitzgerald was on a Republican Witch Hunt and kept it going 3 more years and now has someone in court for not remembering marginal and unimportant details of phone calls from the summer of 2003. In each indictment point for Libby, Libby says he DID discuss Plame and reporters are saying he did not. Want kind of insanity is this? Fitzgerald is truly out of his mind.