Today’s Washington Post report on Scooter Libby’s posture in the Plame investigation mainly contributes confusion, and fans what is the most dangerous fire of this ordeal: the criminalizing of politics.

Walter Pincus and Howard Kurtz write: “over the past year, [independent counsel Patrick] Fitzgerald’s inquiry has apparently broadened. Some people familiar with the case believe he is trying to determine whether the leak of Plame’s identity was part of a conspiracy within the Bush administration to discredit Wilson for his statements critical of the White House’s use of intelligence in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq.”

The use of “conspiracy” here is disingenuous – to the point of perilous. A conspiracy is a not just any agreement. It is a criminal agreement. Its object has to be a crime, or else it’s not a conspiracy.

It is not a crime in the United States for political partisans to join together in a plan to discredit their political adversaries. It is something that is done everyday. Last week, for example, Lanny Davis, Jim Benjamin, Sandy Berger and some of the other usual Clinton campers were out in force, transparently part of a unified effort – to borrow the Washington Post’s above phrasing – to discredit former FBI Director Louie Freeh for his statements critical of President Clinton’s national security record. Similarly, Democrats are out there every day with their talking points, joining together in an effort to discredit the Bush administration on everything from hurricanes to Haliburton.

Of course, Messrs. Pincus and Kurtz would never call any of that a “conspiracy.” They would call it “politics,” and they’d be right. But it is no different from White House officials rolling out a strategy to discredit Wilson, a committed enemy of the President’s foreign policy who made stunning public misrepresentations about how he came to be sent to Niger, what he found when he got there, and what happened when he got back – fabrications that were unabashedly designed to use a public platform he should never have been given to turn the American people against the war effort.

It would be a “conspiracy” for officials to agree to violate the law against leaking classified information or the law against revealing the covert status of an intelligence agent they knew the government was taking steps to protect. I doubt that either of those happened, but we shall see. In any event, though, you can’t get around the proof deficit for real crimes by redefining the “conspiracy” to cover legal conduct. There was nothing illegal about agreeing that Joe Wilson was not credible and that the public should know about it.