In a September 28, 2003 Washington Post story, reporters Dana Priest and Mike Allen quoted a senior administration official as saying that the leak of Valerie Plame’s identity and occupation were clearly “meant purely and simply for revenge.” The official said that “two top White House officials called at least six Washington journalists” with the information.

The official also appears to have identified the leakers to Priest and Allen: “The official would not name the leakers for the record and would not name the journalists.” (Emphasis mine: Communications with Priest and Allen were among the items specified when special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald subpoenaed White House phone and email records in January of last year.)

We know from his attorney that senior Bush advisor Karl Rove was one of the leakers. We don’t know the identity of the second leaker, or of the administration official who leaked their names, off the record, to Priest and Allen.

A “senior administration official” could be one of several people in the White House, the CIA and two or three Cabinet offices. Rove and White House chief of staff Andy Card are “senior administration officials.” Bush himself has occasionally delivered comments under that rubric, as have former press secretary Ari Fleischer, who held the office at that time, and communications director Dan Bartlett.

Scooter Libby, Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, is the “senior administration official” who most often speaks for Cheney. At the time of the leak, then-National Security Council chief Condi Rice and her deputy, Stephen Hadley, were the most prominent source of “senior administration official” comments from that office. Elliott Abrams, the Council’s Middle East desk man, was another.

At the Pentagon, chief spokesman Lawrence di Rita is a senior administration official. Paul Wolfowitz and his deputy were, as were Steven Cambone, Rumsfeld’s deputy for intelligence, and Doug Feith, Rumsfeld’s deputy for making up intelligence.

The senior administration officials at the State Department would have included Colin Powell and his number two, Richard Armitage, along with then-spokesperson Richard Boucher and perhaps a few deputies, including undersecretary for arms control and celebrated kneecapper John Bolton.

CIA officials would include Tenet, but beyond that it’s hard to say. There may be others who could be called senior administration officials and were in a position to know about the leaks in as much detail as Priest’s and Allen’s leaker did, but I don’t know about them if they exist.

We can eliminate a number of these officials as potential leakers about the leakers. Rove is out, of course, as are the officials who would have sympathized with his motives or appear not to have known what was going on. McClellan is the only one we think safe to include in the latter category; the former would include Libby and the rest of Cheney’s office, including the vice president; all of the Pentagon officials; Elliott Abrams; Bolton; most probably Rice and Hadley; and, of course, Rove. The other leaker is almost surely one of the second group.

So that leaves us with Tenet and possibly someone else at the CIA, Andy Card, and Powell and Armitage.

My pick at the time was Andy Card, solely because his wife is a Methodist minister and it was possible some ethics rubbed off on him. But with Newsweek reporter Michael Isikoff’s suggestion that the leakers may have learned Plame’s name and occupation from a classified State Department report, Powell and Armitage have to move up on the list.

But the problem that people in the White House, Rove among them, may have is how did they know that Valerie Plame, or Wilson’s wife worked at the CIA? What we do know is there was a classified State Department report that said this, that was taken by Secretary of State Powell with him on the trip to Africa that President Bush was then on, and many senior White House aides were on.

That classified State Department report appears to have been — or may well have been the source for the information that Rove and others were then dishing out to reporters. And if that’s the case, there still may be — we don’t know yet, but there still may be an instance where classified information was provided to reporters.

Investigators subpoenaed records of calls to and from Air Force one during that trip, so Isikoff’s notion that the State Department report — which had apparently been widely circulated by that time — may have played a role in the affair makes sense, and if that did happen, at least some people at State would be mightily disturbed. Armitage in particular is known for a bruising style and an unkind attitude toward trespassers on his turf.

On the other hand, we know that a lot of people at the CIA were disturbed — it was Tenet who referred the case to the Justice Department for investigation — so someone there can’t be ruled out.

One hopes reporters are continuing to pursue the question of who leaked on the leakers. Has anyone from the State Department testified to the grand jury? John Bolton? Armitage? Powell?

Other questions include whether Bolton was on the Air Force One expedition for which phone records were subpoeanaed — the trip lasted from July 7, 2003, to July 12, 2003, and Rove identified Mrs. Joe Wilson as a CIA agent to Time reporter Matt Cooper on July 11 — and what exactly is it about Ari Fleischer’s July 12, 2003, Nigeria press gaggle comments about Wilson that got the full transcript subpoenaed by the investigators.

And a reminder: the press are in the habit of saying the investigation is 18 months old. In fact, it began on September 29 of 2003; Fitzgerald took over in January of last year after John Ashcroft recused himself on December 30 of 2003. So in reality the investigation is 21 months and counting, although perhaps reporters have a reason for discounting the three Ashcroft months.

Standing by …

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