The Armitage effect

Not idle chitchat
But in his recent column Sept. 14, 2006, Novak says Armitage is sugarcoating the actual events. Novak writes the former State Department official had a motive, "Armitage did not slip me this information as idle chitchat, as he now suggests. He made clear he considered it especially suited for my column."

Novak says Armitage gave him specific details of Plame's employment, and her involvement in sending her husband to Niger.  Novak writes, "he identified to me the CIA division where Mrs. Wilson worked, and said flatly that she recommended the mission to Niger by her husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson."

Armitage says he made a terrible mistake in revealing Plame's employer at the time. He says, "Oh I feel terrible. Every day, I think I let down the president. I let down the Secretary of State. I let down my department, my family and I also let down Mr. and Mrs. Wilson."

But he points out, he didn't even know Plame's name. "I didn't know the woman's name was Plame. I didn't know she was an operative," he says.

Muddling the timeline
These conflicting accounts of how Armitage passed Plame's name to Novak will likely be brought out at trial according to legal experts. The disagreement in this account could also muddle the entire timeline of events which the Special Counsel will likely present to the jury.

And more details of the exchange between Armitage and Novak were revealed in a court filing by the Wilson's themselves when they named Armitage as a defendant in their civil suit along with Vice President Cheney, Karl Rove and Libby. They write that Armitage possessed a memo that specifically mentioned Plame.  Attorney's for the Wilson's write, "The memorandum was stamped "Secret" and the paragraph that mentioned Mrs. Wilson was prefaced with the letters "S/NF" meaning Secret/No Foreign. In other words, the information was classified and too sensitive to be shared with foreigners."

Early in the CIA/Leak probe, Armitage told investigators he was Novak's source. He says months after his meeting with Novak he was re-reading Novak's July 2003 newspaper column and on Oct. 1, 2003, it dawned on him that, when Novak wrote, "he was told by a non-partisan gun slinger," that passage referred to him.

"I almost immediately called Secretary Powell and said, 'I'm sure that was me,'" Armitage says.  Armitage then immediately met with FBI agents who were beginning to investigate the leak.  "I told them that I was the inadvertent leak," Armitage says. He didn't get a lawyer, however.

And, when Libby was indicted on October 28, 2005, Fitzgerald said, at a news conference at the Justice Department, that it was Libby who was the first official to discuss Plame. That leak, Fitzgerald said, came in a conversation with New York Times reporter Judith Miller on June 23, 2003.

It wasn't until after Fitzgerald's news conference in October, that Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward reminded Armitage that he had made a passing comment to him about Plame just days before Libby's conversation with Miller in June. That meant that Armitage, not Libby, had been the first to mention Plame to a reporter. Armitage said he quickly informed Fitzgerald of that recollection.  Armitage had spoken to FBI investigators and testified before the grand jury about his conversation with Novak. But had forgotten, until reminded by Woodward, about a conversation he had with him about Plame.

Memory lapses and factual distortions?
Weisenberg says Armitage's lapse in memory - on the meeting with Woodward, which occurred prior to speaking with Novak - can be exploited by Libby's lawyers to a Washington jury. He says Armitage's memory lapse about Woodward may put doubt in the mind of the jury that Libby was the only person to have "misremembered" the facts and chronology of the leak to reporters.

Special Counsel Fitzgerald asked Armitage not to say anything publicly about his conversations with Woodward and Novak until he was allowed to speak with CBS recently.

Victoria Toensing writes in an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, "when the FBI interviewed Mr. Armitage on Oct. 2, he admitted to the Novak conversation only, notably forgetting meeting with one of our country's premier investigative reporters."  Toensing, a Libby defender, also writes, "By his silence, Mr. Armitage is responsible for one of the most factually distorted investigations in history."

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