Is Cliff May a Lying Liar?

Mark Kleiman makes an interesting point [and I see so does a commenter at JustOneMinute]. When the Plame scandal first surfaced in late 2003, Clifford May of the National Review wrote the following:

On July 14, Robert Novak wrote a column in
the Post and other newspapers naming
Mr. Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, as a CIA
operative.

That wasn't news to me. I had been told
that — but not by anyone working in the
White House. Rather, I learned it from
someone who formerly worked in the
government and he mentioned it in an
offhand manner, leading me to infer it was
something that insiders were well aware of.

This was an important claim. If true, it would seem to support the idea that Plame's identity was common knowledge in certain Washington circles and that Karl Rove and Scooter Libby might well have first learned her identity via non-official sources, which they both claimed when first questioned by investigators.

But I've always been suspicious of May's claim. It seemed to sync too well with the talking points of the White House's most partisan defenders. And, at least to my knowledge, May has never repeated this assertion, despite opining endlessly on the Plame affair at NRO over the last two plus years.

In July of 2005, David Corn confronted May about his earlier claim. Here's what Corn wrote:

I recently asked May if he had been contacted
by Fitzgerald or had appeared before the
grand jury. He told me he had been
interviewed by FBI agents. But, he added, he
had been asked not to discuss what he had
said to them. So he was interviewed by FBI
agents but not summoned to the grand jury.
Does that mean he did not tell the agents
anything of vital importance?

I think that's a fair assumption, and one apparently confirmed by Fitzgerald's recent letter to Libby's defense team. In that letter, Fitzgerald writes:

While we do not intend to provide discovery in
this regard . . . we advised you during the
Jan. 18 conference call that we were not aware
of any reporters who knew prior to July 14,
2003, that Valerie Plame, Ambassodor
Wilson's wife, worked at the CIA, other than:
Bob Woodward, Judith Miller, Bob Novak,
Walter Pincus and Matthew Cooper.

May's name is conspicuously absent from that list. Now it's possible that Fitzgerald simply forgot about him or that he doesn't consider May to be a "reporter" (if it's the latter, I'm sympathetic to Fitzgerald's position). But I think the much more logical conclusion is that May was not being truthful in his 2003 article. When he was approached by the FBI, he likely told them the truth, that he didn't know about Plame prior to Novak's column, and that was that. He didn't have any useful information to contribute to the investigation, so they never talked to him again. That would explain why he hasn't repeated his claim since then. He's just hoping people will forget about it.

So until May comes forward with a better explanation, I'm going to assume that he is liar.