Connecting the Dots in Leakergate.

[DemsUnited]

Strap on the tinfoil, kiddies. It's time to play CONNECT THE DOTS!

It's July 2003, just before Plame's identity was leaked to columnist Robert Novak. Colin Powell accompanies George W. Bush on a trip to Africa. He takes with him a classified department intelligence report on whether Iraq had sought uranium from Niger. In the report is information that Wilson's wife attended a meeting at the CIA where the decision was made to send Wilson to Niger, but the report did not mention her last name or undercover status. At the time, White House officials were seeking to discredit Wilson, who had become a public critic of the Bush administration.

President Bush is sitting next to Karl Rove. He picks up the classified file and flips through it.

“Lookit here, Turdblossom,” he says. “Wilson’s wife was at the CIA meeting where they decided to send him to Africa.”

Bush’s Brain immediately kicks into high gear. He excuses himself, goes to a quiet part of Air Force One and makes two phone calls.

First, he calls Scooter Libby, who works closely with the White House Iraq Group, an internal task force created to publicize the threat of Saddam Hussein. “See if that’s something we can use,” he says.

Then he calls one of his favorite reporters.

Judy Miller.

Miller is a White House darling. Her series of articles about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq—courtesy of the now-notorious Ahmad Chalabi—for the New York Times was very helpful to the Bush administration as they sought to bolster the case for war. Surely she would help discredit Wilson and deflect attention away from the content of his July 6 Op Ed piece, "What I Didn't Find in Africa". Since Wilson's article had also been published in the New York Times, it was just icing on the cake that his credibility would be questioned by one of that paper's own top reporters.

Miller--who often relies on well-placed and carefully tended connections to nab her stories--had made good use of secret CIA sources during her extensive reporting on WMDs. So when Rove calls her with the info gleaned from Colin Powell's classified report, she thinks for a second.

"I’ve heard about Joe Wilson's wife," Miller tells Rove. "Her name is Valerie and she works in WMDs, something pretty important. I’ll see what I can dig up.”

And so it begins…

Or maybe not. But it's summer time and it's fun to speculate :)