Did Joe Wilson Clear Rove?

To listen to the Democrats you would think that Karl Rove has committed high treason. The Hill reports that Tuesday, as Senator Hillary Clinton nodded in agreement, John Kerry said: “Karl Rove ought to be fired.” Kerry also circulated a “fire Rove” petition yesterday through his leadership political action committee to nearly 3 million Democratic activists.

Kerry and company smell blood after the disclosure that Rove, in a July 2003 e-mail to Time magazine's Matt Cooper, said a trip that former Ambassador Joe Wilson took to Niger for the CIA was arranged by "Wilson's wife, who apparently works at the agency." Rove didn't provide her name.

Today Joe Wilson called on President Bush to fire Karl Rove

USA Today reports that the "outing" of Wilson's wife "may not have been a crime at all."

According to USA Today, in his book, "The Politics of Truth," Wilson writes that he and his future wife both returned from overseas assignments in June 1997:

Neither spouse, a reading of the book indicates, was again stationed overseas. They appear to have remained in Washington, D.C., where they married and became parents of twins.

Six years later, in July 2003, the name of the CIA officer — Valerie Plame — was revealed by columnist Robert Novak.

The column's date is important because the law against unmasking the identities of U.S. spies says a "covert agent" must have been on an overseas assignment "within the last five years." The assignment also must be long-term, not a short trip or temporary post, two experts on the law say. Wilson's book makes numerous references to the couple's life in Washington over the six years up to July 2003.

"Unless she was really stationed abroad sometime after their marriage," she wasn't a covert agent protected by the law, says Bruce Sanford, an attorney who helped write the 1982 act that protects covert agents' identities.

The Democratic clamoring for Rove's scalp is much more than much ado about nothing, it's much ado about politics.

Comments

[SoloD]

I am shicked to find politics going on here!

(Remind me again, that whole impeachment thing, that wasn't politically motivated was it?)

[steve sturm]

Ah, but as I point out, would Fitzgerald still be on the case if he had determined that Plame was not a covered individual under the statute?