From the Minneapolis Star Tribune ...
Former CIA operative Valerie Plame is Paula Jones -- if with national security credentials and Beltway savoir-faire. Both women filed iffy lawsuits that seemed more designed to discredit a president than to prevail in a court of law.
Jones never could prove that then-Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton hurt her career as a state worker after he allegedly sexually harassed her. Hence, there were no economic damages, as Judge Susan Webber Wright noted when she ruled against Jones.
The suit filed last week by Plame and her husband, former Ambassador Joe Wilson, against Bush biggies -- Veep Dick Cheney, Cheney's former chief of staff Scooter Libby and Bush guru Karl Rove -- is equally nonsensical.
"She wasn't fired," said attorney Victoria Toensing, who served in the Reagan administration. "She worked for 2½ years [at the CIA] after the revelation. Nobody fired her. She's got a book deal she would not have had."
At least Plame emerges with a deal to write her memoirs for Simon & Schuster, whereas Jones' contribution to publishing was posing for Penthouse -- an odd choice for a woman who claimed to be suing Clinton to restore her reputation. Then again, Plame's photo spread in Vanity Fair didn't quite fit with her alleged desire to stay under the radar while she worked at the CIA.
There was some truth in both women's stories. Whatever did or did not follow, Jones did establish that Clinton invited her to a hotel room. As for Plame, she had a legitimate beef in complaining that Bushies outed her identity as a CIA employee -- even if the leak was not illegal. (Special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald's failure to prosecute the man who first leaked Plame's identity suggests the leak was not illegal.)
And there is an element of fiction in both stories. Jones' tale about Clinton's retaliation never held water. If Plame's job depended on anonymity, her hubby shouldn't have penned an op-ed for the New York Times.
The biggest similarity between Plame and Jones, however, is that both the Clinton and Bush administrations could have spared themselves a long legal nightmare if either one had not tried to make itself seem more virtuous than it was. Clinton should have refused to allow Jones' attorneys to depose him. If he had not lied to Jones' attorneys, Ken Starr would have had no cause to question Monica Lewinsky.
If Bush had not promised to fire anyone who illegally leaked Plame's info, or if staffers had told the media, that, yes, they'd talked about Plame, but they did not realize her job was classified -- then, as one insider told me, it could've been a one-day story. Well, maybe not a one-day story, but surely not a three-year story.
That said, Bush haters are mistaken in putting Wilson on a pedestal as his lawsuit is misleading. To wit, it cited a May 2003 New York Times column by Nicholas Kristof about Wilson's 2002 trip to Niger to check out allegations that Iraq had tried to obtain uranium from Africa: "According to the column, the ambassador reported back to the CIA and State Department in early 2002 that the allegations were unequivocally wrong and based on forged documents."
That's what Kristof wrote, but the column was off. As the Senate Intelligence Committee reported, the CIA did not find Wilson's oral report to unequivocally come down against Saddam Hussein trying to procure uranium in Niger. And Wilson could not have known about the forged documents when he made the report.
Like Paula Jones with the anti-Clinton crowd, Wilson always has been happy to mislead Bush haters. From the start, Joe Wilson was Paula Jones. Now Valerie Plame is, too.
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