Plame, Wilson to take CIA leak lawsuit to Supreme Court Nick Cargo

Published: Tuesday November 18, 2008





Print This Email This Former CIA operative Valerie Plame Wilson and her husband, former ambassador Joseph Wilson, plan to take their civil lawsuit against Bush administration officials to the Supreme Court after a federal circuit court refused to rehear the case on Monday.



Wilson v. Cheney, filed in 2006, charges that Bush administration officials such as Vice President Cheney, and aides Karl Rove and I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, violated Plame's constitutional rights in allegedly engineering the outing Plame, who was undercover at the time, as retaliation against her husband, an Iraq war critic, who had been sent to Niger in 2002 to investigate the possible sale of yellowcake uranium to Iraq. While Wilson reported back that such sales were unlikely to have taken place, President Bush asserted to the contrary in his 2003 State of the Union address, prompting Wilson to speak out publicly in a July 6, 2003 New York Times piece entitled "What I Didn't Find in Africa."



Plame Wilson's cover was famously blown while she was helping track distribution and acquisition of weapons of mass destruction in Iran. Her name was leaked to columnist Robert Novak, who published it in his July 14, 2003 column. He said in July 2007 that the source of the leak was former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, but said that it was not meant to be a deliberate act on the part of the White House to hurt the Wilsons.



In August, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit upheld a district judge's dismissal of the suit saying that it failed to establish a constitutional issue.



"There must be consequences when government officials abuse their power and endanger national security for political ends," said CREW Executive Director Melanie Sloan on Tuesday. "This is an issue worth fighting over and we will not give up."



