The White House Iraq Group Conspiracy

* Jason Leopold has a tantalising new article out about traitorgate - lots of interesting stuff - most specifically that Fitz is actively looking into the source of the nigeranium documents - and it looks as though Fitz is considering conspiracy charges against the White House Iraq Group.

The most interesting tea-leaving for our cuurent purposes is perhaps this:

" One of the officials interviewed for this story was also cited in a September 28, 2003, Washington Post story about the motivation to leak Wilson's wife's identity to the media. "Clearly, it was meant purely and simply for revenge," the State Department official told the Post. The Post did not name the official."

As you know, I've been using the working assumption that this person was Grossman (see here and here for some recent posts). AFAIK, Leopold's article today is the first time that the SAO has been identified as a State Dept Official - which means that we can eliminate some of the other suspects - notably Ari Fleischer.

Leopold is somewhat cagey about whether the State Department Official is current or former. He does go out of his way to identify another State Dept source as being 'current' - which leads me to believe that this particular State SAO is former (although it isn't clear) - so i'm again leaning to this being Grossman.

There's also this very curious paragraph:

"All of the sources interviewed separately for this story said they were told that Karl Rove was the person who first suggested using the media to "turn the tables on Wilson." The officials wouldn't identify the person who told them this. The decision, however, was made during a meeting that took place between the White House Iraq Group."

ten bucks to the first person to unpick whatever the hell secret message is embedded in those two sentences.

There's also this:

" Cheney found out who Wilson was in May 2003, according to the indictment handed up against Libby in late October. Cheney found out that Wilson's wife worked at the CIA. He shared the information with Libby, although Libby had been snooping around on his own and found out the same information, too.

In fact, according to sources knowledgeable about the discussions that took place during this time, only a handful of Cheney's very close aides knew the identity of the person trashing the administration's pre-war intelligence. Karl Rove wasn't even in the know yet, the sources said.

White House officials' decision to retaliate against Wilson by blowing his CIA wife's cover to reporters would come less than a month later - in early June 2003."

Karl (apparently) didn't find out till later - despite the fact that the OVP had been going bonkers about Wilson, and despite the fact that Karl was a member of WHIG, and WHIG was being run out of the OVP.

curiouser and curiouser.