Was "Outing" Valerie Plame a Crime?
Thanks to Tom Maguire, here's the Washington Post's report on a brief filed yesterday.

A federal court should first determine whether a crime has been committed in the disclosure of an undercover CIA operative's name before prosecutors are allowed to continue seeking testimony from journalists about their confidential sources, the nation's largest news organizations and journalism groups asserted in a court filing yesterday.

The 40-page brief, filed in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, argues that there is "ample evidence . . . to doubt that a crime has been committed" in the case, which centers on the question of whether Bush administration officials knowingly revealed the identity of undercover CIA operative Valerie Plame in the summer of 2003. Plame's name was published first by syndicated columnist Robert D. Novak and later by other publications.

The Left have been salivating over this thing for nearly two years now because they want someone in George W. Bush's White House to pay. But let's not forget: Joe Wilson was the one who outed his own wife. How's that? Because the decision to send someone of his qualifications to check on the story of Nigerien yellowcake was a curious one. It would have been natural, in the wake of his infamous New York Times editorial, to ask how some unqualified ambassador from the Clinton Administration managed to get such an assignment. After all, Wilson's motivations are not above question, are they?

As Wilson wrote in that editorial of 6 July 2003:

After consulting with the State Department's African Affairs Bureau (and through it with Barbr[a] Owens-Kirkpatrick, the United States ambassador to Niger), I agreed to make the trip.

Maybe so, but that "consultation" wasn't just the result of some random drawing. Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, is the one who got him the job. She is the one who arranged that "consultation."

And, considering the rather high-profile approach he took to contradicting the President, that fact would have been uncovered by any investigative journalist worth his or her salt.

As it is, the well-connected Robert Novak was told the name.

You took your shot, Joe. Better luck next time.