Jonah, you’re right. And two top attorneys (whose names you’d know but I won’t mention in case they’d rather I didn’t) told me the other night that they found it puzzling that Floyd Abrams, the lawyer for The New York Times’ Judith Miller and Time magazine’s Matt Cooper, have not asked for an evidentiary hearing to establish whether or not a crime has taken place.

Instead, Abrams has turned this controversy into a First Amendment issue. Why? Possibly because he’s a First Amendment lawyer, less concerned with getting his clients out of a jam than he is with expanding the privilege and status accorded to journalists — as you correctly argue in “Pride About Privilege” in the 12/27 NRDT.

May I also point out that way back on July 12, I wrote in NRO that if Valerie Plame “was not working undercover and if the CIA was not taking measures to protect her cover — no law was broken by columnist Bob Novak in naming her, or by whoever told Novak that she worked for the CIA.

“It is against the law to knowingly name an undercover agent. It is not against the law to name a CIA employee who is not an undercover agent. For example, I know the identity of ‘Anonymous,’ the CIA employee who has now written a book trashing the Bush administration for its policies. But since he is not — to the best of my knowledge — a covert operative, I would be committing no crime were I to name him in this piece.”