Inside opinion

This is really interesting: if you head on over to Talking Points Memo, you can read an email that was sent to Josh by a "retired US Ambassador" who gives his insight into what may have happened with that State Department memo that is being linked to Rove. Some highlights:

When you're on Air Force One, you are in a confined space. If someone -- anyone -- read that memo, they could have walked 10 feet and shared it with anyone else. All the bureaucratic boundaries of Washington break down when you're in one of those situations. You're all together. Bloomberg said that Ari Fleischer was seen reading it. Plus according to other accounts, he started telling reporters on board that they should ask about how it was that Wilson got to go on the trip. Plus we know that Ari made phone calls from the plane -- they could have been to Rove, Libby, Novak, or whoever, to alert them to what he had just read. When Rove says "I never read anything/saw any memo," he could very well be right. But someone should have asked him, "did you hear about the memo? Did someone describe its contents to you?"

There is another way that Rove could have heard about Valerie Plame, and that is via Scooter Libby. I haven't seen anyone suggest this route, but we all know that Scooter and Cheney were deep into the intelligence. They went out to the Agency to meet with the analysts (and allegedly harrassed them). I am sure that Scooter participated in meetings in the White House/EOB where CIA analysts on WMD and Iraq were present. As we know, Valerie was one such analyst. Is it not possible that Scooter had met her on one or more occasions before Joe Wilson started going public? Since she's a looker, he certainly would have remembered her face and name. And then, once Joe writes his op-ed, Scooter realizes the connection between Valerie and Joe, or he asks around and quickly finds out. He then informs Rove. This is all speculation on my part. Joe would know whether Valerie had met Scooter before.

The third possibility is Bolton or his staff. (Remember that his chief of staff was from the CIA.) Again, Bolton was deeply into the intelligence on Iraq and WMD. When INR sent the memo to Grossman in June, Bolton's office no doubt got a copy of it, given the way the Department works. Given the neo-con circle in the Administration, it would not have taken long for Bolton to tip off Libby to the Wilson-Plame-CIA connection.

Read the whole thing.