....So what does this all mean to the ongoing Plamegate investigation? Well, another source close to Bolton recently described his management style to me as "Very hands on. Nothing goes by him. His staff does what he wants. He's not the kind of guy to have his staffers freelancing." So, if Fleitz was a key source of the Plame info and Bolton is not the kind of guy to have his staffers freelancing… does this mean Bolton was being less than forthcoming when he told people, in the words of my source, that "the first time he ever heard Valerie Plame's name was when he read it in the newspaper"? Or was he merely sharing talking points with Tim Russert?
Arianna connects the dots. Also, Bolton was a regular source for Judith Miller.
And then there's David Wurmser. Joseph Wilson wrote in his book:
... senior advisers close to the president may well have been clever enough to have used others to do the actual leaking, in order to keep their fingerprints off the crime. John Hannah and David Wurmser, mid-level political appointees in the vice president's office, have both been suggested as sources of the leaks. I don't know either, though at the time of the leak, Wurmser, a prominent neoconservative, was working as a special assistant to John Bolton at the State Department. Mid-level officials, however, do not leak information without authority from a higher level. They would have been instruments, not the makers, of decisions.
Arianna presents some of the unanswered questions:
...here is what we don't know: we don't know the pathway through which Plame's identity got into Novak's column. Did Miller learn about Plame from her old chum Bolton? Did she pass that info on to Libby? Or had Bolton already told Libby? And Rove? Or was it all just passed around and around in a cozy game of neocon phone tag? It makes one wonder more than ever before what Bolton and Miller talked about when he visited her in jail.