According to the banner on MSNBC, a judge has thrown out Valerie Plame's lawsuit with the White House over the CIA leak.

No details as yet.

UPDATE:

WASHINGTON - A federal judge on Thursday dismissed former CIA operative Valerie Plame's lawsuit against members of the Bush administration in the CIA leak scandal.

Plame, the wife of former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, had accused Vice President Dick Cheney and others of conspiring to leak her identity in 2003.

Plame said that violated her privacy rights and was illegal retribution for her husband's criticism of the administration.

...

The judge dismissed the case on jurisdictional grounds, and said he wouldn't express an opinion on the constitutional arguments.

So, there you go.

Labels: Plamesgate: the imagined scandal that really wasn't

You'd have to be living under a rock not to have heard that President Bush used his Presidential powers to commute Scooter Libby's 30-month prison sentence.

I've read in a few places where people are throwing around the "p" word, but this was no pardon. The president didn't excuse what Libby may or may not have done, he merely signalled that he felt that the sentence was excessive. He left the fine and the supervised release portions of the sentence intact.

And, considering the hand-slap that Sandy Berger got for stealing and destroying national documents of imperative importance, this still seems excessive, but at least it comes closer to being reasonable. The guy who actually let the cat out of the bag on Valerie Plame got off scot-free, so it seems ridiculous for Libby to go to jail.

I appreciate what the President did today. I think it was the right thing. He certainly had it in his power to do more, but this action says he respects the process and the verdict of the jury, but feels the punishment was excessive.

Of course, Democrats are still going to rip the President on charges of cronyism and abuse of power, but their grand poo-bah basically sold pardons like it was a White House yard sale and "everything must go", so they don't have a whole lot of credibility on this one in my book.

Labels: Plamesgate: the imagined scandal that really wasn't

The world is so screwed up.

You may have missed the Drudge siren yesterday, but a jury found Scooter Libby guilty on four charges yesterday, among them perjury and obstruction of justice.

But, let's be clear: these charges came about not because of the Valerie Plame "Leak", but because of the investigation of a supposed "leak". Because, as we all now know, Plame was not undercover, or even an undercover agent at the time. Therefore, it wasn't really a big state secret that she was driving a desk at Langley. Furthermore, the guy who did "leak" (even though it still wasn't illegal and by doing so no crime was committed), a State Department employee - one Richard Armitage - will not see prosecution of any sort. At all. None. CAUSE IT WASN'T A FREAKIN' CRIME!

Even so, Libby was found guilty of lying in the course of the investigation into this non-crime - the non-crime part of which has been known since the very beginning because Plame was not undercover. Which in my opinion, and please excuse my language here, if fucking stupid.

Sandy Berger sneaks classified documents out of the National Archives in his freakin' socks and pants, destroys some of those same documents, and he barely gets a slap on the hand. And that, friends, is a damn travesty of justice. And yet, Scooter Libby is going to jail for not remembering all of the details around something that WASN'T A FREAKIN' CRIME and in no way had any national security ramifications.

What next? What damn next? Idiots!

Labels: Pantsgate, Plamesgate: the imagined scandal that really wasn't, Sandy Berger, Scooter Libby