The Plame affair (also known as the CIA leak scandal and Plamegate) was a political scandal that revolved around journalist Robert Novak's public identification of Valerie Plame as a covert Central Intelligence Agency officer in 2003.
In 2002, Plame wrote a memo to her superiors in which she expressed hesitation in recommending her husband, former diplomat Joseph C. Wilson, to the CIA for a mission to Niger to investigate claims that Iraq had arranged to purchase and import uranium from the country, but stated that he "may be in a position to assist". After President George W. Bush stated that "Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa" during the run-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Wilson published a July 2003 op-ed in The New York Times, "What I Didn't Find in Africa", stating his doubts during the mission that any such transaction with Iraq had taken place.
A week after Wilson's op-ed was published, Novak published a column in The Washington Post which mentioned claims from "two senior administration officials" that Plame had been the one to suggest sending her husband. Novak had learned of Plame's employment, which was classified information, from State Department official Richard Armitage. Journalist David Corn and others suggested that Armitage and other officials had leaked the information as political retribution for Wilson's article.
The scandal led to a criminal investigation; no one was charged for the leak itself. Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, Scooter Libby, was convicted of lying to investigators. His prison sentence was ultimately commuted by President Bush in 2007, and he was pardoned by President Donald Trump in 2018.
Background
State of the Union Address
In late February 2002, responding to inquiries from the Vice President's office and the Departments of State and Defense about the allegation that Iraq had a sales agreement to buy uranium in the form of yellowcake from Niger, the Central Intelligence Agency had authorized a trip by Joseph C. Wilson to Niger to investigate the possibility. The former Prime Minister of Niger, Ibrahim Hassane Mayaki, reported to Wilson that he was unaware of any contracts for uranium sales to rogue states, though he was approached by a businessman on behalf of an Iraqi delegation about "expanding commercial relations" with Iraq, which Mayaki interpreted to mean uranium sales. Wilson ultimately concluded that there "was nothing to the story", and reported his findings in March 2002.
In his January 28, 2003, State of the Union Address, US President George W. Bush said "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."
"What I Didn't Find In Africa" After the March 2003 invasion of Iraq, Joseph C. Wilson wrote a series of op-eds questioning the war's factual basis (See "Bibliography" in The Politics of Truth). In one of these op-eds published in The New York Times on July 6, 2003, Wilson argues that, in the State of the Union Address, President George W. Bush misrepresented intelligence leading up to the invasion and thus misleadingly suggested that the Iraqi government sought uranium to manufacture nuclear weapons.
However, an article by journalist Susan Schmidt in The Washington Post on July 10, 2004, stated that the Iraq Intelligence Commission and the United States Senate Select Committee on Intelligence at various times concluded that Wilson's claims were incorrect. She reported that the Senate report stated that Wilson's report actually bolstered, rather than debunked, intelligence about purported uranium sales to Iraq. This conclusion has retained considerable currency despite a subsequent correction provided by the Post on the article's website: "Correction: In some editions of the Post, a July 10 story on a new Senate report on intelligence failures said that former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV told his contacts at the CIA that Iraq had tried to buy 400 tons of uranium from the African nation of Niger in 1998. In fact, it was Iran that was interested in making that purchase." Wilson took strong exception to these conclusions in his 2004 memoir The Politics of Truth. The State Department also remained highly skeptical about the Niger claim.
Former CIA Director George Tenet said "[while President Bush] had every reason to believe that the text presented to him was sound", because "[f]rom what we know now, Agency officials in the end concurred that the text in the speech was factually correcti.e. that the British government report said that Iraq sought uranium from Africa," nevertheless "[t]hese 16 words should never have been included in the text written for the President." With regard to Wilson's findings, Tenet stated: "Because this report, in our view, did not resolve whether Iraq was or was not seeking uranium from abroad, it was given a normal and wide distribution, but we did not brief it to the President, Vice-President or other senior Administration officials."
"Mission To Niger" Eight days after Wilson's July 6 op-ed, columnist Robert Novak wrote about Wilson's 2002 trip to Niger and subsequent findings and described Wilson's wife as an "agency operative".
In his column of July 14, 2003, entitled "Mission to Niger", Novak states that the choice to use Wilson "was made routinely at a low level without [CIA] Director George Tenet's knowledge." Novak goes on to identify Plame as Wilson's wife:
Wilson never worked for the CIA, but his wife, Valerie Plame, is an agency operative on weapons of mass destruction. Two senior administration officials told me that Wilson's wife suggested sending him to Niger to investigate the Italian report. The CIA says its counter-proliferation officials selected Wilson and asked his wife to contact him. "I will not answer any question about my wife," Wilson told me.
Novak has said repeatedly that he was not told, and that he did not know, that Plame wasor had ever beena NOC, an agent with Non-Official Cover. He has emphatically said that had he understood that she was any sort of secret agent, he would never have named her.
On July 16, 2003, an article published by David Corn in The Nation carried this lead: "Did Bush officials blow the cover of a U.S. intelligence officer working covertly in a field of vital importance to national securityand break the lawin order to strike at a Bush administration critic and intimidate others?"
In that article, Corn notes: "Without acknowledging whether she is a deep-cover CIA employee, Wilson says, 'Naming her this way would have compromised every operation, every relationship, every network with which she had been associated in her entire career. This is the stuff of Kim Philby and Aldrich Ames.'" Wilson has said:
In October 2007, regarding his column "A White House Smear", Corn writes:
Department of Justice investigation On September 16, 2003, the CIA sent a letter to the United States Department of Justice (DoJ), requesting a criminal investigation of the matter. On September 29, 2003, the Department of Justice advised the CIA that it had requested an FBI investigation into the matter.
On September 30, 2003, President Bush said that if there had been "a leak" from his administration about Plame, "I want to know who it is ... and if the person has violated law, the person will be taken care of." Initially, the White House denied that Karl Rove, the White House Deputy Chief of Staff, and Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Chief of Staff of Vice President Dick Cheney, were involved in the leak.
Attorney General John Ashcroft recused himself from involvement with the investigation because of his close involvement with the White House, and the responsibility for oversight fell to James B. Comey, a former prosecutor who had just been appointed deputy attorney general three weeks previously. Comey then appointed Patrick Fitzgerald to investigate the matter as Special Counsel who convened a grand jury. The CIA leak grand jury investigation did not result in the indictment or conviction of anyone for any crime in connection with the leak itself. However, Libby was indicted on one count of obstruction of justice, one count of perjury, and three counts of making false statements to the grand jury and federal investigators on October 28, 2005. Libby resigned hours after the indictment.
United States v. Libby The federal trial United States v. Libby began on January 16, 2007. On March 6, 2007, Libby was convicted on four counts, and was acquitted of one count of making false statements. Libby was sentenced to 30 months in prison, a fine of US$250,000, and two years of supervised release after his prison term.
After the verdict, Special Counsel Fitzgerald stated that he did not expect anyone else to be charged in the case: "We're all going back to our day jobs." On July 2, 2007, President Bush commuted Libby's jail sentence, effectively erasing the 30 months he was supposed to spend in jail. Libby was pardoned by Donald Trump on Friday, April 13, 2018.
In March 2008, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) revealed that the investigation had cost $2.58 million. The GAO also reported that "this matter is now concluded for all practical purposes."
Civil suit
According to testimony given in the CIA leak grand jury investigation and United States v. Libby, Bush administration officials Richard Armitage, Karl Rove, and Lewis Libby discussed the employment of a then-classified, covert CIA officer, Valerie E. Wilson (also known as Valerie Plame), with members of the press.
The Wilsons also brought a civil lawsuit against Libby, Dick Cheney, Rove, and Armitage, in Wilson v. Cheney. On July 19, 2007, Wilson v. Cheney was dismissed in United States District Court for the District of Columbia. On behalf of the Wilsons, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington filed an appeal of the U.S. District Court's decision the following day.
In dismissing the civil suit, United States District Judge John D. Bates stated:
The merits of plaintiffs' claims pose important questions relating to the propriety of actions undertaken by our highest government officials. Defendants' motions, however, raise issues that the Court is obliged to address before it can consider the merits of plaintiffs' claims. As it turns out, the Court will not reach, and therefore expresses no views on, the merits of the constitutional and other tort claims asserted by plaintiffs based on defendants' alleged disclosures because the motions to dismiss will be granted ... The alleged means by which defendants chose to rebut Mr. Wilson's comments and attack his credibility may have been highly unsavory. But there can be no serious dispute that the act of rebutting public criticism, such as that levied by Mr. Wilson against the Bush Administration's handling of prewar foreign intelligence, by speaking with members of the press is within the scope of defendants' duties as high-level Executive Branch officials. Thus, the alleged tortious conduct, namely the disclosure of Mrs. Wilson's status as a covert operative, was incidental to the kind of conduct that defendants were employed to perform.
Judge Bates ruled that the "plaintiffs have not exhausted their administrative remedies under the Federal Tort Claims Act, which is the proper, and exclusive, avenue for relief on such a claim." Bates ruled that the FTCA outlines the appropriate remedy since the FTCA "accords federal employees absolute immunity from common-law tort claims arising out of acts they undertake in the course of their official duties," and the "plaintiffs have not pled sufficient facts that would rebut the [FTCA] certification filed in this action."
The Wilsons appealed that decision the next day. On August 12, 2008, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit upheld the District Court's ruling in a 2–1 decision.