Several e-mailers have taken me to task for what they insist is a willful misreading of what Joseph Wilson told Wolf Blitzer yesterday about the supposedly classified status of his wife, Valerie Plame. They may have a point. Blitzer said to Wilson, “The other argument that’s been made against you is that you’ve sought to capitalize on this extravaganza, having that photo shoot with your wife, who was a clandestine officer of the CIA, and that you’ve tried to enrich yourself writing this book and all of that.

What do you make of those accusations, which are serious accusations, as you know, that have been leveled against you.”

To which Wilson replied, “My wife was not a clandestine officer the day that Bob Novak blew her identity.”

So yes, you can read this as Wilson saying it was Novak who blew her clandestine cover. But then, right afterward, Blitzer said this:

“But she hadn’t been a clandestine officer for some time before that?”

To which Wilson replied, “That’s not anything that I can talk about. And, indeed, I’ll go back to what I said earlier, the CIA believed that a possible crime had been committed, and that’s why they referred it to the Justice Department.”

Wilson is being disingenuous. Of course he can talk about whether she had been clandestine beforehand — because since her cover was blown, it would hardly seem a state secret today. As she was working at CIA headquarters in a policy-analysis job at the time of Novak’s column, there’s no way she was “clandestine” then. However, she might have been “clandestine” at some point in the five years previous, in which case the intentional revelation of her status for the purpose of doing her harm would be prosecutable under the Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982.

That seems more and more unlikely as the days pass, though it might be possible for Joe Wilson to be prosecuted under the terms of the Blowdried Blowhard Blabbermouth Bulls—ter Act of 2005 (okay, no such legislation exists, but it would if I were king)!