Quote:

the G-man said:
More on Woodward's role, and who the leaker might have really been, from Newsweek:

    One by one last week, a parade of current and former senior officials, including the CIA's George Tenet and national-security adviser Stephen Hadley, denied being the source.

    A conspicuous exception was former deputy secretary of State Richard Armitage, whose office would only say, "We're not commenting."

    If Armitage was the original leaker, that undercuts the argument that outing Plame was a plot by the hard-liners in the veep's office to "out" Plame. Armitage was, if anything, a foe of the neocons who did not want to go to war in Iraq. He had no motive to discredit Wilson. On "Larry King Live" last month, Woodward was dismissive of the special prosecutor's investigation, suggesting that the original leak was not the result of a "smear campaign" but rather a "kind of gossip, as chatter ... I don't see an underlying crime here."




Quote:

the G-man said:
POWELL AIDE SEEN AS NOVAK'S LEAKER

    Renewed speculation centered on Colin Powell's top aide Richard Armitage as the original leaker in the Valerie Plame case yesterday after columnist Robert Novak's latest revelations.

    Novak was the first journalist to identify Plame as a CIA staffer and in a column yesterday he gave new information but declined to identify his first source, simply repeating it wasn't "a political gunslinger."

    That fits Armitage who, like Powell, was skeptical about the Iraq war and knew that Plame played a role in setting up an Iraq-linked trip for her husband, Joe Wilson.

    If Armitage was the source of the leak, it is unlikely his goal was discredit Iraq war critics as Wilson has claimed.

    The Post has [also] reported Armitage is the likely source




Quote:

the G-man said:
David Corn and Michael Isikoff have a new book which confirms that <a href="http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/14533384/site/newsweek/" target="blank">Richard Armitage was the original Plame leaker</a>. Close observers had already figured this out; Tom Maguire, for one, zeroed in on Armitage months ago. Maguire's <a href="http://justoneminute.typepad.com/main/2006/08/richard_armitag.html" target="blank">most recent post on the topic</a>, noting Armitage's (vague) association with the McCain campaign team, came just this Tuesday.




The New York Muthafuckin Times:

    Richard L. Armitage, a former deputy secretary of state, has acknowledged that he was the person whose conversation with a columnist in 2003 prompted a long, politically laden criminal investigation in what became known as the C.I.A. leak case, a lawyer involved in the case said on Tuesday.

    In the accounts by the lawyer and associates, Mr. Armitage disclosed casually to Mr. Novak that Ms. Wilson worked for the C.I.A. at the end of an interview in his State Department office. Mr. Armitage knew that, the accounts continue, because he had seen a written memorandum by Under Secretary of State Marc Grossman.

    According to an account in a coming book, “Hubris, the Inside Story of Spin, Scandal and the Selling of the Iraq War’’ by Michael Isikoff and David Corn, excerpts of which appeared in Newsweek this week, Mr. Armitage told a few State Department colleagues that he might have been the leaker whose identity was being sought.

    The book says Mr. Armitage realized that when Mr. Novak published a second column in October 2003 that said his source had been an official who was “not a political gunslinger.’’

    The Justice Department was quickly informed, and Mr. Armitage disclosed his talks with Mr. Novak in subsequent interviews with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, even before Mr. Fitzgerald’s appointment.

    The book quotes Carl W. Ford Jr., then head of the intelligence and research bureau at the State Department, as saying that Mr. Armitage had told him, “I may be the guy who caused this whole thing,’’ and that he regretted having told the columnist more than he should have.

    He was also the source for another journalist about Ms. Wilson, a reporter who did not write about her. The lawyers and associates said Mr. Armitage also told Bob Woodward, assistant managing editor of The Washington Post and a well-known author, of her identity in June 2003.

    Mr. Woodward was a late player in the legal drama when he disclosed last November that he had the received the information and testified to a grand jury about it after learning that his source had disclosed the conversation to prosecutors.


So...let's go over it again.

Rove was not the leaker. Libby was not the leaker. Cheney was not the leaker. Bush was not the leaker.

The leaker was a guy who worked for Colin Powell and leaked the name accidentally. He didn't leak it as "payback" for Joe Wilson's report on yellowcake uranium.

Everything I've been trying to tell you guys on the left for the past two years was absol-fucking-lutely correct.