Judge Dismisses Plame Lawsuit By Carol Leonnig
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, July 19, 2007; 3:30 PM
A federal judge today dismissed a lawsuit filed by former CIA officer Valerie Plame and her husband against Vice President Cheney and top administration officials over the disclosure of Plame's name and covert status to the media.
U.S. District Judge John D. Bates said that Cheney and White House aides cannot be held liable for the disclosure of information about Plame in the summer of 2003 while they were trying to rebut criticism of the administration's war efforts levied by her husband, former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV. The judge said such efforts were certainly part of the officials' scope of normal duties.
"The alleged tortious conduct, namely the disclosure of Mrs. Wilson's status as a covert operative, was incidental to the kind of conduct that defendants were employed to perform," Bates wrote in an opinion released this afternoon.
Bates also ruled that the court lacked the power to award damages for public disclosure of private information about Plame. The judge said that was because Plame and Wilson had failed to exhaust other remedies in seeking compensation from appropriate federal agencies for the alleged privacy violations.
The Wilsons' lawsuit claimed that Cheney, his chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, senior White House adviser Karl Rove and former deputy secretary of state Richard L. Armitage violated the couple's privacy and constitutional rights by participating in discussions that led to Plame's identity being publicly revealed. They claimed the leaks to reporters were an effort to retaliate against Wilson.
Plame's identity was disclosed in a syndicated column in July 2003, days after Wilson publicly accused the Bush administration of twisting intelligence Wilson gathered on a mission for the CIA. He said the White House sought to exaggerate Iraq's nuclear threat and justify an invasion.
Libby was convicted in March of lying to a grand jury and FBI agents investigating the leak, and was sentenced in June to 2 1/2 years in prison. President Bush commuted his sentence earlier this month, eliminating the prison time.