Taranto: The Prophet Motive

OpinionJournal

By some accounts last week was a bad one for President Bush. But it was a very good week for us, at least when it comes to political prognostication. First, of course, came the withdrawal of Harriet Miers's Supreme Court nomination on Thursday, fulfilling our prediction 20 days earlier on PBS's "The Journal Editorial Report" that she would not be confirmed. (A hat tip to Dan Henninger, who on the same program got even more specific: "President withdraws her, proposes someone else, galvanizes the party.")

Then on Friday came the anticlimactic finale of the Valerie Plame kerfuffle, the indictment (PDF) of Vice President Cheney's now former chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, on charges of obstruction of justice, false statements and perjury. Our prediction on this, from the July 15 episode of the same PBS program, is worth quoting at length:

Paul Gigot: What kind of legal jeopardy is Karl Rove in, based on what we know now?

Taranto: On a scale of one to 10, Paul, I would say roughly a zero. Look, the allegation is that Rove violated something called the Intelligence Identities Protection Act. This is a 1982 law that's meant to shield the identities of covert CIA agents. In order to be a covert CIA agent under this law, you have to be stationed overseas or to have been stationed overseas sometime in the past five years. Joe Wilson in his book acknowledges that his wife's last overseas assignment was in 1997, six years before this so-called leak took place. There's no crime here.

Gigot: It also is true that you must have disclosed the CIA agent's identity maliciously and as part of your normal official government function.

Taranto: You have to have learned it through your government functions, and you have to have disclosed it knowing that the government was taking affirmative measures to conceal it. Now Robert Novak, who first reported this, said later that he had asked the CIA if it was OK to disclose this name. He said the CIA said we'd rather not, but made only--and these are his words--"a very weak objection." So it doesn't sound like the government was taking affirmative measures.

Gigot: Of course, we do have that independent counsel, the Special Counsel, Patrick Fitzgerald, who was appointed a couple of years ago, looking into this. Do we know what it is precisely he's looking at? Could he be looking at anything more than whether that law was violated? Something like perjury or lying under oath?

Taranto: Well, as Martha Stewart can attest, sometimes just being involved in a criminal investigation can get you into trouble if you do the wrong thing. So yes, there may be conceivably indictments based on something that arose out of the investigation, even if there is no underlying crime.

And that is exactly what happened. The Libby indictment does not allege that Valerie Plame was a covert agent. Nor is Libby charged with conspiracy, as some Angry Left moonbats had been expecting. Libby's alleged crimes all occurred after the investigation began. The charges against him are serious, but no one should lose sight of the bigger picture: The special prosecutor has apparently found no evidence that anyone was guilty of anything two years ago, back when Joe Wilson was calling for Karl Rove to be "frog-marched out of the White House in handcuffs." As we've been arguing for two years, this was an investigation about nothing. Call it the "Seinfeld" scandal.