Remember Valerie Plame? She was the undercover CIA officer whom right-wing columnist Robert Novak outed by name back in 2003. Dick Cheney's chief of staff, "Scooter" Libby, was later convicted of lying to investigators about the scandal. But before he could be hauled off to the hoosegow, George W. Bush commuted his sentence. (Benedict Donald later pardoned him, of course. It's a pattern with him.)
The whole Plame nightmare is just one reason we don't have warm and fuzzy feelings about people named Cheney, by the way. But that's something for another blog post.
Meanwhile, more than 20 years later, the Republicans have clearly learned nothing. Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg said today that in the Signal conversation the Trumpsters carelessly looped him into about their military strike in Yemen, Trump's CIA chief, John Ratcliffe, clearly identified one of his covert operatives to the group. "I withheld her name," Goldberg said. "I didn't put it in the story because she's under cover. But, I mean, the CIA director put it into the chat."
Is that bad? That seems bad.
Once upon a time, Ratcliffe, like nearly everyone else involved in the FUBAR'd Signal thread, was oh-so-stern about protecting our national secrets. He went on FOX "News" in 2019 and bleated, "Mishandling classified information is...a violation of the Espionage Act. It started with Hillary Clinton. It has continued without accountability."
Um, no. It never "started with Hillary Clinton," because no classified information ever turned up on her private server. But the GOP's never-ending hypocrisy led Clinton to weigh in on Twitter yesterday with "You've GOT to be kidding me." (We sense a missing adjective in that tweet — something starting with "f" and ending with "ing.")
We've searched for Valerie Plame on social media, but so far, no luck. Would some enterprising journalist be willing to connect the dots and call her for a comment? It could be interesting. We cats HISS.
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