The Case of the Missing Crime. The CIA leaker has been found. No law was broken. Why is the prosecutor still going after Scooter Libby?

Clarice Feldman in the Weekly Standard provides an outstanding summary of the Wilson/Plame/Libby case.

He begins:

The New York Times and Washington Post are hard at work airbrushing history to obscure their role in promoting Joseph C. Wilson's incredible tale of his Mission to Niger and subsequent fantasy of martyrdom at the hands of Karl Rove. Both add insult to injury. While minimizing their own responsibility for the three-year witchhunt for an imagined White House conspiracy, they still suggest that I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby--Vice President Cheney's former chief of staff and the only man indicted in the case--committed a crime for which he must be held accountable.

Really? It would appear that the Fourth Estate has been as inattentive to the criminal case as it was to the facts that led up to it. The case against Libby is as weak as the basis for the investigation was, and the animus that impelled it so distorted the investigative process as to make its continuation a travesty. It's long past time for Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald to do the right thing and drop the charges.

We now know that the July 2003 leak that launched this case came from the State Department, not the White House. Columnist Robert Novak wondered (as did many in Washington) why such an acid critic of the Bush administration's Iraq policy as Joe Wilson--not a spook but a retired foreign service officer and Clinton NSC staffer--had been chosen by the CIA to investigate Saddam Hussein's interest in Niger's uranium. So at the end of an hour-long interview with Colin Powell's top aide at the
State Department, Richard Armitage, Novak put the question to him. Armitage replied, in so many words, here's a good nugget for your column: It was Wilson's wife's idea to send him, she works at the CIA. Novak confirmed the gossip and included it as a detail in his next column. It was, in many respects, a routine Washington transaction between a political columnist and a well-placed source. All these details, in their essentials, were known to the Justice Department by October 2003. Why, then, was a special prosecutor unleashed two months after that? Why were reporters subpoenaed, compelled to testify, even jailed? Why is Libby still under indictment and threatened with prison in a trial expected to begin next January? Let's review the origins of this sorry story.

Read the whole thing.