From: "Rich Gauszka" 


"Tony Ingenoso"  wrote in message
news:42db3cea{at}w3.nls.net...
> Worthless spin - Cooper already testified Rove didn't do it.
>

Not as cut and dried as you'd like to believe

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/18/politics/18law.html?adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=11216911
21-9o70tGeFNHtweIc3rUOG1g&oref=login

Neither of the two White House officials who are known to have discussed a
C.I.A. officer with a reporter for Time magazine appear to have named her.
But that fact by itself, legal experts said, will not provide the officials
with a defense to charges under a 1982 law that makes it a crime to
identify covert operatives in some circumstances.


"The statute does not require that the name be disclosed,"
Jeffrey H. Smith, a former general counsel for the Central Intelligence
Agency who is now in private practice at Arnold & Porter in Washington,
said on Sunday. "It just says that you cannot intentionally disclose
any information identifying a covert agent."

It was the fact that Mr. Wilson's wife worked for the agency, rather than
her name or covert status, that Mr. Rove conveyed, Mr. Cooper said.

"Before that conversation," he said on the CNN program
"Reliable Sources," "I had never heard about anything about
Joe Wilson's wife. After that conversation, I knew that she worked at the
C.I.A. and worked on W.M.D. issues. But as I made clear to the grand jury,
I'm certain Rove never used her exact name and certainly never indicated
she had a covert status."

Mr. Cooper said his later conversation with Mr. Libby was along the same lines.

"Like Rove," Mr. Cooper wrote in an article in Time to be
published Monday, "Libby never used Valerie Plame's name or indicated
that her status was covert."

The question of whether the officials used Ms. Wilson's name "is a
nonstarter" under the Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982,
said Abner Greene, a law professor at Fordham University. Referring to her
as Mr. Wilson's wife is sufficient to satisfy one aspect of the law, which
prohibits the disclosure of "any information identifying" the
"covert agent."

But the law has other requirements.

A prosecutor seeking to establish a violation of the law has to show an
intentional disclosure by someone with authorized access to classified
information. That person must also know that the disclosure identifies a
covert operative "and that the United States was taking affirmative
measures to conceal such covert agent's intelligence relationship to the
Unites States." A covert operative is defined as someone whose
identity is classified information and who has served outside the United
States within the last five years.

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