Leakgate Update: The Bolton Connection

Over at the Huffington Post, Arianna Huffington has what seems, at least at first glance, to be a fairly important new post on the Plame affair. Huffington writes:

I'm now hearing that the investigation may be
inching closer to never-confirmed UN
Ambassador John Bolton. According to two
sources, Bolton's former chief of staff, Fred
Fleitz, was at least one of the sources of the
classified information about Valerie Plame that
flowed through the Bush administration and
eventually made its way into Bob Novak's now
infamous column.

When I first read that paragraph, I thought Arianna had finally identified Bob Novak and/or Judith Miller's mysterious source. But then I reread it. She's not claiming that Fleitz leaked information to any journalists; she's merely claiming that Fleitz found out about Plame (or knew about her already) and passed that information along to others in the administration. Indeed, later in the post Arianna observes that "we don't know the pathway through which Plame's identity got into Novak's column."

But we've long known that the State Department (where Fleitz worked) was asked to prepare an official memo about Joe Wilson's Niger trip, a memo which included the classified detail that Plame worked for the CIA. So obviously at least a few people in the State Department (i.e. the ones who talked to the CIA and prepared the memo) knew about Plame. If Fleitz was one of these people, it would not be at all surprising. He is, after all, a former CIA agent, and he functioned as a liaison between the CIA and State Department. Indeed, he might well have been the guy at State tasked with the job of finding out what the CIA knew about Wilson's trip, in which case he was merely doing his job. We always knew that somebody in the State Department had to have performed this task. The fact that it was Fleitz, therefore, doesn't add a whole lot to the story other than some circumstantial support for the inference that Bolton knew about Plame.

But even if Bolton knew about Plame, does that necessarily mean anything? True, given his connection to Judy Miller (he's been a source for her in the past and even visited her in jail) and his membership in the neocon club, Bolton seems like a logical suspect. Speculation about Bolton's involvement in the leak has been a favorite topic on lefty blogs. Although I've speculated quite a big about the Plame investigation, I've yet to mention the Bolton theory. I ignored this line of speculation for the same reason Tom Maguire did, because it didn't seem to mesh with what we knew about Fitzgerald's investigation. First, as Maguire points out, speculation about Bolton's involvement didn't surface until after he was nominated to be U.N. Ambassador and had already become a lightning rod for liberal criticism for totally unrelated reasons. Tying him to the Plame leak seemed like wishful-thinking on the part of lefty bloggers, a way of mushing two stories into one (plus, I seriously doubted that the White House would have nominated Bolton for such a high profile post if they had any inkling that he was the potential target of Fitzgerald's probe). But more importantly, there was no evidence that Fitzgerald had pursued Bolton or his staff. Bolton was never interviewed, subpoenaed, or called to testify before the Grand Jury.

So does Arianna's piece change my mind? Is there now reason to suspect that Bolton was involved in the leak? I don't know. Unlike the "professional" journalists at the New York Times and Washington Post, Arianna generally doesn't hold back any information. She lays everything she knows out on the page (and then some). And after rereading this post a few times, my sense is that, as the saying goes, "there's no there there."

But not to be outdone by Arianna, I'll leave you with this bit of speculation. Though Arianna never suggests that Fleitz himself might be Novak's source, doesn't he seem like a more logical candidate than Bolton? Fleitz is a former CIA agent who may well have known Plame personally. At the time of the leak, he worked in a dual capacity for both the CIA and State Department. Novak described his source as "no partisan gunslinger" and, according to Wilson's book, Novak told Wilson that his source was in the CIA. There's no evidence that Fleitz has been called before the grand jury, but there may be a good reason for that. If Fitzgerald has reason to believe that Fleitz is the leaker (perhaps because Novak ratted him out), he might not need his testimony. Because Fleitz worked for the CIA (and was a former agent himself), exploring his knowledge and intent is less important than it would be for, say, Rove or Libby. Fitzgerald might well be able to make a prima facie showing of knowledge and intent simply by pointing to Fleitz's CIA credentials and past associations with Plame.

But alas, I suppose this line of speculation suffers from some of the same defects as Arianna's. If Fleitz is the leaker, why hasn't Fitzgerald interviewed his boss? Wouldn't he at least want to assure himself that Fleitz wasn't acting at Bolton's behest? It's all enough to make your head spin. Maybe someday we'll have some answers.