If Plame Cheney Breached, Then You Must Impeach

While I am not a lawyer, it does seem to me that Patrick Fitzgerald, prosecutor in the Scooter Libby trial, is trying to weave a narrative that points to Vice-President Cheney as the ultimate source for the leak that outed Ambassador Joe Wilson's wife Valerie Plame as a covert CIA operative.

The key issue is, did Cheney set the wheels in motion to out her to get back at Wilson for debunking the claim that Saddam's agents were shopping for nuclear material in Africa? A claim that President Bush used to help make the case for the Iraq War.

Witness these two damning paragraphs from today's Washington Post:

"FBI agent Deborah S. Bond also testified that Libby said that, while he was preparing to be interviewed by investigators in the fall of 2003, he came across a handwritten note he had made during a phone conversation with Vice President Cheney. The note made it clear that, shortly before June 12, 2003, Cheney had told Libby that Plame worked at the CIA's counterproliferation division and was married to an outspoken critic of the Iraq war.

"Libby's conversation with Cheney took place nearly a month before Libby telephoned Tim Russert, NBC's Washington bureau chief. According to Bond, Libby said that, during that call, Russert mentioned that "all the reporters" knew that former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV's wife worked at the CIA. Libby told the investigators that "it was as if it was the first time he heard it," Bond said.

The bar for impeachment is high. That's why I am trying to think methodically, as opposed to emotionally.

If Cheney told Libby this just as an aside, well, that sounds like internal office communications.

But if Cheney told Libby this with the direct or even tacit expecations that Libby, Karl Rove or others would make the rounds of favored reporters and rat Plame out, then the matter becomes infinitely more serious.

At that point, we'd either have an instance that would cause us to ask if Cheney told Libby not to tell anyone and LIbby simply blabbed, or whether Cheney, in some way, countenanced this leak.

If the latter, then the issue to me is the degree of expectation Cheney had vested that the leak would go public, and embarass Wilson.

If that's the way this investigatory trajectory goes, it would then appear we have a Vice-President of the United States outing one of our own intelligence operatives for the sake of petty revenge.

At that juncture, sentiment for articles of impeachment to be drawn up would likely be substantial.