UPDATE:

Mac Ranger has been focused on a group of ex-CIA anti-war types named VIPS which I discussed here after his tip. Well Mac has found something in this group’s screeds to President Bush which eerily coincides and mimics the timeline of stories below:

July 14, 2003: “It is now dawning on our until-now somnolent press that your national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, shepherds the foreign affairs sections of your state-of-the-union address and that she, not Tenet, is responsible for the forged information getting into the speech. But the disingenuousness persists. Surely Dr. Rice cannot persist in her insistence that she learned only on June 8, 2003 about former ambassador Joseph Wilson’s mission to Niger in February 2002, when he determined that the Iraq-Niger report was a con-job. Wilson’s findings were duly reported to all concerned in early March 2002. And, if she somehow missed that report, the New York Times’ Nicholas Kristoff on May 6 recounted chapter and verse on Wilson’s mission, and the story remained the talk of the town in the weeks that followed.
…
Whatever Rice’s or Powell’s credibility, it is yours that matters. And, in our view, the credibility of the intelligence community is an inseparably close second. Attempts to dismiss or cover up the cynical use to which the known forgery was put have been—well, incredible. The British have a word for it: “dodgy.”

All nicely coincidental how the same erroneous theme keeps returning to the same point.

END UPDATE

Mac Ranger is on a tear with this Plame Game controversy, and I am connecting the dots a bit more here. A timeline is important, and while Tom Maguire has the master timeline I want to add some focus and detail to May, June and July 2003 (emphasis mine).

May 6th, 2003: Kristof writes the first article about Wilson without naming names. Kristof sites the CIA debriefing of Wilson, which we learn in the senate investigation later is held at the Wilson’s house by to DO analysts – who report very different content than the Kristof piece – and Joe and Valerie. The DO analysts report does not contain any information on forgeries since the debrief was in Feb 2002 and the forgeries surfaced in Sep 2002.

This proves, in my mind, the Wilsons were Kristof’s sources and he knew of their marriage and her employer (how else to validate the wild claims being made by Joe?). The two DO analysts’ report and testimony is at odds with the Kristof rendition – eliminating them as possible sources. This makes Kristof and the NY Times vetting process the first to know of Valerie and Joe.

June 12, 2003: Walter Pincus pens the next article in the series which again does not name the Wilsons – but does have details only a few beyond the Wilsons themselves would know at this time. The wild card here is a “a former government official” sited as a source to the story. Again, we have reports on the Wilson Debriefing which can only come from Valerie and Joe:

the CIA in early February 2002 dispatched a retired U.S. ambassador to the country to investigate the claims, according to the senior U.S. officials and the former government official, who is familiar with the event. The sources spoke on condition of anonymity and on condition that the name of the former ambassador not be disclosed.

During his trip, the CIA’s envoy spoke with the president of Niger and other Niger officials mentioned as being involved in the Iraqi effort, some of whose signatures purportedly appeared on the documents. [actually Wilson did not meet with any current government officials per direction of the Ambassador]

After returning to the United States, the envoy reported to the CIA that the uranium-purchase story was false, the sources said. Among the envoy’s conclusions was that the documents may have been forged because the “dates were wrong and the names were wrong,” the former U.S. government official said.

Because (a) they were two of the only four people at the debriefing at their house and (b) the comments in the article again include details on the document forgery which were months after the debriefing this must be the Wilsons talking ! That is two articles in two months with the same detail not f0und in the DO analysts’ debrief report.

June 13, 2003: Kristof pens another article on the issue, with lots of sources:

To help out Ms. Rice and Mr. Cheney, let me offer some more detail about the uranium saga. Piecing the story together from two people directly involved and three others who were briefed on it, the tale begins at the end of 2001, when third-rate forged documents turned up in West Africa purporting to show the sale by Niger to Iraq of tons of “yellowcake” uranium.

And the same exact situation where the membership of the debriefing was Valerie and Joe, plus two DO analysts who should not be supporting the idea of a forgery since that had not happened yet:

The agency chose a former ambassador to Africa to undertake the mission, and that person flew to Niamey, Niger, in the last week of February 2002. This envoy spent one week in Niger, staying at the Sofitel and discussing his findings with the U.S. ambassador to Niger, and then flew back to Washington via Paris.

Immediately upon his return, in early March 2002, this senior envoy briefed the C.I.A. and State Department and reported that the documents were bogus, for two main reasons. First, the documents seemed phony on their face — for example, the Niger minister of energy and mines who had signed them had left that position years earlier. Second, an examination of Niger’s uranium industry showed that an international consortium controls the yellowcake closely, so the Niger government does not have any yellowcake to sell.

That is three articles in a little over a month with the same detail which can only point to the Wilsons.

June 23, 2003: Miller meets with Scooter Libby and they discuss a ‘clandestine guy’ but no names. However, Miller’s notes are replete with the name ‘Wilson’. Is she helping the NY Times vet the Kristof/Wilson stories? Did Kristof win out in race to get Wilson to do the Op-Ed on their pages vs the Washington Post’s?

July 4th, 2003: The Wilsons have a big party with family (her parents at least) and some journalist guests. I first discovered the ‘party’ in this post discussing an Oct 8, 2003 article by Leiby and Dana Priest where it is clear the reporters are in attendance, and possibly one Larry C Johnson (ex-CIA, anti-war fanatic).

Mac Ranger today has another Lieby Pincus article that comes out two days later on July 6, 2003 and now names Wilson. As Mac points out, this is the same day as Wilson’s own coming-out article in the NY Times. Is this the Pincus/Leiby payback for not getting the Wilson story – a race to the scoop? Most likely. I would not be surprised if the NY Times and Washington Post were in a bidding war with the Wilsons for the story.

Going back to the 4th of July party, that must have been one big party. It seems they had Leiby over given his two articles, and this comment in the July 6th article:

“It really comes down to the administration misrepresenting the facts on an issue that was a fundamental justification for going to war,” Wilson said yesterday. “It begs the question, what else are they lying about?”
…
For the past year, Wilson has spoken out against the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, but until he was interviewed by The Post and wrote an op-ed article published in today’s New York Times, he had never disclosed his key role in the Niger controversy.
…
While his family prepared for a Fourth of July dinner, he proudly showed a reporter photos of himself with Bush’s parents. On a den wall was a framed cable to him in Baghdad, from the first President Bush, dated Nov. 20, 1990:

From July 6th on, the NY Times has a reasonable timeline out. But notice all these events they somehow left off?

And just who was at this big July 4th party? Pincus and Leiby and Larry Johnson and Valerie and Joe and Valerie’s parents…..?

Was this the final strategy meeting for an all out assault. Was David Corn there as well? Only ten days after Wilson came out, and only 2 days since Novak’s outing of Plame, Corn had details all about Plame’s so called ‘cover’.

So he will neither confirm nor deny that his wife–who is the mother of three-year-old twins–works for the CIA. But let’s assume she does.

Hmm, let’s assume she does work for the CIA and have 3 year old twins???

Shall we assume some more things?

If she is not a CIA employee and Novak is reporting accurately, then the White House has wrongly branded a woman known to friends as an energy analyst for a private firm as a CIA officer.

Wonder how David learned that gem? Corn has lots of direct quotes from Wilson and details. Yes, he could have gotten it from Wilson after the fact. But then again, this could have been part of the strategy laid out over the 4th of July to escalate the issue.

Make sure to keep an eye on the master himself, Tom Maguire. Here is his latest update post.