Nobody "outed" Plame... except Novak
Bob Novak has finally broken his silence and revealed that noone gave him Valerie Plame's name. His primary source, who remains unnamed, apparently made an inadvertent & passsing reference to Wilson's wife having had a role in his getting the Niger assignment during the course of a lengthy interview that covered a number of other subjects. Novak picked up on the comment, looked up Wilson's wife's name in Who's Who (there's tight cover, for ya), called the CIA & asked if she worked there, was told she did indeed. He apparently then related this information to Rove during a phone conversation, who said only that he'd "heard the same thing," without ever mentioning her name.
There was never an orchestrated administration "operation" to "discredit" Wilson by "leaking" his wife's name & role in the Niger mission. They merely defended themselves against Wilson's false accusations, and the likes of the NYT ginned up the whole "campaign to discredit Wilson" out of otherwise thin air, jumping to that conclusion on the slimmest of suppositions. But because that supposition fit with the biased opinion of the motivations & intent of this administration, it was simply assumed (and proclaimed) to be true. I, for one, never understood how revealing Plame's identity would undermine Wilson or his claims, anyway; one simply has nothing to with the other and we now know that the revelation of her identity was simply seized upon as a pretext for the claims of a smear campaign against Wilson. There is a looking glass quality to this whole thing - the attack press conducting a "campaign" to undermine & counter an alleged "campaign" to discredit Wilson that was a figment of the attack press's fevered imagination in the first place.
All of which helps explain why the only thing Fitzgerald could do was try to trip someone up under oath.