Informed Speculation

…lurks Richard Armitage. Yesterday, I focused on a Times of London story that has Stephen Hadley as Woodward’s source for the identity of Valerie Plame. Another good candidate is the aforementioned Richard Armitage (and that has the advantage of making my original prediction just about golden):

One by one last week, a parade of current and former senior officials, including the CIA’s George Tenet and national-security adviser Stephen Hadley, denied being the source. A conspicuous exception was former deputy secretary of State Richard Armitage, whose office would only say, “We’re not commenting.” He was one of a handful of top officials who had access to the information. He is an old source and friend of Woodward’s, and he fits Novak’s description of his source as “not a partisan gunslinger.” Woodward has indicated that he knows the identity of Novak’s source, which further suggests his source and Novak’s were one and the same.

If Armitage was the original leaker, that undercuts the argument that outing Plame was a plot by the hard-liners in the veep’s office to “out” Plame. Armitage was, if anything, a foe of the neocons who did not want to go to war in Iraq. He had no motive to discredit Wilson. On “Larry King Live” last month, Woodward was dismissive of the special prosecutor’s investigation, suggesting that the original leak was not the result of a “smear campaign” but rather a “kind of gossip, as chatter … I don’t see an underlying crime here.”

For more on Armitage as the likely candidate, see this oddly named but otherwise typically excellent post from Tom Maguire…