Matt Cooper speaks

Between tuna sandwiches. And he says he asked Libby about Wilson's wife during their conversation.

On Aug. 23, I had a tuna sandwich and gave a deposition in Abrams' Washington office about the conversation. The Wilson part that really interested Fitzgerald was tiny, as I told TIME readers. Basically, I asked Libby if he had heard anything about Wilson's wife having been involved in sending him to Niger. Libby responded with words to the effect of, "Yeah, I've heard that too."

In the indictment, Fitzgerald didn't say "words to that effect", he said Libby's comment was "without qualification". Again, let's hear the tapes.

Meanwhile, Glenn Reynolds weighs in on the Plame game wrapup, and smacks one out of the park:

Consider: Assuming that Valerie Plame was some sort of genuinely covert operative -- something that's not actually quite clear from the indictment -- the chain of events looks pretty damning: Wilson was sent to Africa on an investigative mission regarding nuclear weapons, but never asked to sign any sort of secrecy agreement(!). Wilson returns, reports, then publishes an oped in the New York Times (!!) about his mission. This pretty much ensures that people will start asking why he was sent, which leads to the fact that his wife arranged it. Once Wilson's oped appeared, Plame's covert status was in serious danger. Yet nobody seemed to care.

This leaves two possibilities. One is that the mission was intended to result in the New York Times oped all along, meaning that the CIA didn't care much about Plame's status, and was trying to meddle in domestic politics. This reflects very badly on the CIA.

The other possibility is that they're so clueless that they did this without any nefarious plan, because they're so inept, and so prone to cronyism and nepotism, that this is just business as usual. If so, the popular theory that the CIA couldn't find its own weenie with both hands and a flashlight would appear to have found some pretty strong support.

Either way, it seems to me that everyone involved with planning the Wilson mission should be fired. And it's obvious that the CIA, one way or another, needs a lot of work.

The whole thing was so ridiculous on it's face that the administration must have done some laughing behind the scenes-- it had to be obvious. Guess they're not laughing now, since the plan to gingerly get the word out on Wilson backfired, although Libby could just be taking a bullet and hoping 2008 gets here soon.

Drudge is flashing that Fitzgerald wants to call Cheney in open court. Executive privlidge is being bandied about, but the media will go to work getting that fly out of the ointment. The game is on, folks.