all-encompassingly

Apparently the mainstream press has been arguing in court that there was no crime committed with regards to the “outing” of Clown Wilson’s wife.

Why?

Because according to their amici brief she wasn’t undercover at all. Any cover that she ever had was blown by the Russians and then by the CIA several years before George Bush was even president.

Here’s the brief.

Andrew McCarthy has a great piece over at NRO about the entire matter.

Andrew C. McCarthy on Valerie Plame - National Review Online

Have you heard that the CIA is actually the source responsible for exposing Plame’s covert status? Not Karl Rove, not Bob Novak, not the sinister administration cabal du jour of Fourth Estate fantasy, but the CIA itself? Had you heard that Plame’s cover has actually been blown for a decade — i.e., since about seven years before Novak ever wrote a syllable about her? Had you heard not only that no crime was committed in the communication of information between Bush administration officials and Novak, but that no crime could have been committed because the governing law gives a person a complete defense if an agent’s status has already been compromised by the government?

No, you say, you hadn’t heard any of that. You heard that this was the crime of the century. A sort of Robert-Hanssen-meets-Watergate in which Rove is already cooked and we’re all just waiting for the other shoe — or shoes — to drop on the den of corruption we know as the Bush administration. That, after all, is the inescapable impression from all the media coverage. So who is saying different?

The organized media, that’s who. How come you haven’t heard? Because they’ve decided not to tell you. Because they say one thing — one dark, transparently partisan thing — when they’re talking to you in their news coverage, but they say something completely different when they think you’re not listening.

You see, if you really want to know what the media think of the Plame case — if you want to discover what a comparative trifle they actually believe it to be — you need to close the paper and turn off the TV. You need, instead, to have a peek at what they write when they’re talking to a court. It’s a mind-bendingly different tale.

Read the whole thing.