Josh Marshall is the recipient of a memo prepared by some lawyer as to the legality of Rove's behavior. You may recall that Rove denies being the leaker of the information on Valerie Plame, but recently he was forced to admit that he had spread the information further after Robert Novak's news article named her as a CIA agent.
Here's Josh on the memo he says found its way to his desk:
The essential argument is that the law, the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, does more than simply prohibit a governmental official with access to classified information from divulging the identities of covert operatives. The interpretation of the law contained in the memo holds that a government insider, with access to classified information, such as Rove is also prohibited from confirming or further disseminating the identity of a covert agent even after someone else has leaked it.
There is one point the author of the memo doesn't raise. My layman's reading of the memo suggests to me that it would be critical to ascertain whether Rove learned of Plame's identity before the Novak article appeared or whether he learned of it for the first time when he read Novak's column.
If the latter, then I'm not sure the argument contained in the memo holds up.
Again, that's what occurred to me reading this memo. But bear in mind that my legal education is limited to a summer studying for the LSAT and a mortifying few hours about a decade ago taking the damn thing itself.
There is one point the author of the memo doesn't raise. My layman's reading of the memo suggests to me that it would be critical to ascertain whether Rove learned of Plame's identity before the Novak article appeared or whether he learned of it for the first time when he read Novak's column.
If the latter, then I'm not sure the argument contained in the memo holds up.
Again, that's what occurred to me reading this memo. But bear in mind that my legal education is limited to a summer studying for the LSAT and a mortifying few hours about a decade ago taking the damn thing itself.
Here's the memo. (It's pdf format, which I don't have trouble with normally, but I tried to access it twice, and twice it jammed up my browser operation.) I wanted to have a look at it, because Josh's explanation and opinion don't match in my view. I understand his thinking, but the explanation of the memo that he's given leaves the issue simply at prohibiting Rove from doing what he did. If you try the link and get it to work, maybe you can figure it out. Josh's post asks for comments, so I imagine someone will clear this up soon.
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