All Plame-All the Time

[BT]

Plame To Sue CIA - The Irony And The (Near) Ectasy

Ms. Plame has filed suit against the CIA - apparently, even though her dates of service are in the public record, they are still classified.  Somewhere, Libby is thinking that no one told him Ms. Plame had classified status, but his ignorance did not lead to bliss.

But let's cut to the cool bit:

    The C.I.A. acknowledged that the dates of Ms. Wilson’s employment had mistakenly been disclosed, although a spokesman said that did not mean the information was no longer classified.

    “Frankly,” said the spokesman, Mark Mansfield, the release of the information in 2006, in response to a query from Ms. Wilson about retirement benefits, was “an honest-to-goodness administrative error.”

    “The letter contained classified information and should not have been mailed to her,” Mr. Mansfield said, referring to Ms. Wilson. “As soon as it was discovered, we took steps to rectify the error, including notifying the clerk of the House of Representatives.”

    The letter, from February 2006, was entered into the Congressional Record by Representative Jay Inslee, Democrat of Washington, in January 2007. Mr. Inslee was introducing legislation to allow Ms. Wilson to qualify for a government annuity.

    The letter said that Ms. Wilson had worked for the government since Nov. 9, 1985, for a total of “20 years, 7 days,” including “six years, one month and 29 days of overseas service.”

    Christine Hanson, a spokeswoman for Mr. Inslee, said the congressman had assured himself that the document was not classified before disclosing it.

The bill in question was "H.R. 501: For the relief of Valerie Plame Wilson"; Ms. Plame had done her twenty years of government service but was a bit young to actually begin to collect.  And here is the full text of the letter:

    Washington, DC, February 10, 2006.

    Mrs. VALERIE WILSON

    DEAR MRS. WILSON, This letter is in response to your recent telephone conversation with regarding when you would be eligible to receive your deferred annuity. Per federal statute, employees participating under the Federal Employees Retirement System (FERS) Special Category, who have acquired a minimum of 20 years of service, are eligible to receive their deferred annuity at their Minimum Retirement Age (MRA). Your MRA is age 56, at which time you'll be eligible to receive a deferred annuity.

    Your deferred annuity will be based on the regular FERS computation rate, one percent for every year of service vice the FERS Special rate of 1.7% for every year of service. You will receive 1.7% for each year of overseas service, prorated on a monthly basis, after January 1, 1987 in the calculation of your annuity. Our records show that since January 1, 1987, you have acquired 6 years, 1 month and 29 days of overseas service.

    Following is a list of your federal service:

    Dates of Service: CIA, CIA (LWOP), CIA Ð(P/T 40), from 11/9/1985 to 1/9/2006--total 20 years, 7 days.

    Based on the above service and your resignation on January 9, 2006, your estimated deferred annuity is $21,541.00 per year, or $1795 per month, beginning at age 56.

    The above figures are estimates for your planning purposes. The Office of Personnel Management, as the final adjudicator of creditable service and annuity computations, determines final annuity amounts. Please let me know if I can be of any further assistance.

    Sincerely,

And why do we care?  Well, as I said last February and last Wednesday (scroll down to "CHALLENGE ROUND"), Ms. Plame's pension calculation would hold a key to whether the CIA thought she had performed service abroad in the five years before her identity was disclosed to various reporters, which is a key requirement of the IIPA.  Of course the in-house CIA rules would not be binding on a judge, who would also be expected to consider the plain language of the statute and the legislative history.  However, a judge might certainly take a bit of guidance from the CIA rules, which presumably have some basis in law or established practice.

Beyond that, if a mere blogger could infer that the CIA has a record of Ms. Plame's overseas service it surely dawned on Patrick Fitzgerald to ask for this.  So - did he ask for this info (obviously, she would not have yet retired, but personnel records are personnel records)?  Did the CIA give it to him?  Did he fail to disclose to the defense the specific information that Ms. Plame did (or did not) get credit for overseas service for dates after June 1998?  Either Fitzgerald didn't think to ask (hmm...) or he chose not to disclose it to the defense (ethically dubious).  But if he did think to ask for the pension info, who thinks it would have been omitted if it was helpful to Fitzgerald's case?

Lots of questions.  Probably too late to help Libby in his sentencing, but still.

Based on the information available, about all I can say is that I expected to see more time overseas credited to Ms. Plame - from this Vanity Fair profile I would have guessed she was overseas more or less continuously from 1989 through 1997, for about eight years of service.

Well - some lefty blogger with whom Joe and Val are chatty might want to follow up on this.  Unless the answer is not what they want, of course.

MY, MY:  The Libby response on the Government's proposed sentencing fires a torpedo at Jeff's argument that Fitzgerald had made a good-faith determination in 2003/04 that Ms. Plame was covert under the IIPA - emphasis added:

    Second, the government relies on a terse two-and-a-half page summary of Valerie Wilson’s employment history that was generated by the CIA, which purports to establish that “Ms. Wilson was a covert CIA employee for whom the CIA was taking affirmative measures to conceal her intelligence relationship to the United States.”3 We have never been granted an opportunity to challenge this conclusory assertions or any of the other unsubstantiated claims in this document, nor permitted to investigate how it was created. If nothing else, the fact that the CIA’s spokesperson confirmed Ms. Wilson’s CIA employment to Mr. Novak calls into question whether the government was taking affirmative measures to conceal her identity.

    The summary described above was provided to the defense along with a
    companion summary that defined a “covert” CIA employee as a “CIA employee whose employment is not publicly acknowledged by the CIA or the employee.”4 It is important to bear in mind that the IIPA defines “covert agent” differently. It states: “The term ‘covert agent’ means— (A) a present or retired officer or employee of an intelligence agency . . . (i) whose identity as such an officer, employee, or member is classified information, and (ii) who is serving outside the United States or has within the last five years served outside the United States.” 50 U.S.C. § 426. The CIA summary of Ms. Wilson’s employment history claims that she “engaged in temporary duty (TDY) travel overseas on official business,” though it does not say whether such travel in fact occurred within the last five years.  Further, it is not clear that engaging in temporary duty travel overseas would make a CIA employee who is based in Washington eligible
    for protection under the IIPA. In fact, it seems more likely that the CIA employee would have to have been stationed outside the United States to trigger the protection of the statute. To our knowledge, the meaning of the phrase “served outside the United States” in the IIPA has never been litigated. Thus, whether Ms. Wilson was covered by the IIPA remains very much in doubt, especially given the sparse nature of the record.

So, the summary provided by Fitzgerald was quite clearly relying on a different definition of "covert" than the IIPA.  Hmm, the fair-haired wonder omitted that tidbit from his filing, and now the press has moved on.  So when did the DoJ make a good-faith determination that the IIPA was applicable?  I don't believe they ever did.  My thoughts from last Wednesday were here.

http://justoneminute.typepad.com/main/2007/06/plame_to_sue_ci.html