Opinion: Fox News hires reporter who got jailed for not revealing the source who identified the CIA agent whose husband got angry at Bush for blowing her cover (the wife’s, not the reporter’s). But it’s all OK now

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This is a little difficult to explain. But, in the weirdly wondrous world of Washington, it all seems to make sense.

Do you remember that female CIA agent (we’ll call her Veronica -- not her real name; her real name is Valerie) who had a prominent husband sent to Africa by the White House to investigate Saddam Hussein’s attempt to get uranium for the Bomb but later he wrote an op-ed article opposing the Iraq war and his wife’s alleged cover got blown in print allegedly because the White House was angry at him?

And the couple was so concerned about their secret identity that he wrote a book and did a lot of media publicity selling it and they both posed for photos for a big shishy magazine in a convertible driving past the White House?

And there was a veteran columnist who’d identified her in his column, which we’re not going to do because of the secrecy thingy, and the writer refused to say who leaked her name to him? Eventually, he did disclose who told him her name and it wasn’t the guy from the vice president’s office who got charged, so the trial went on nonetheless.

Well, anyway, a lot of people forget there was another newspaper reporter in on that story.

She went to jail for 85 days in 2005 because she would not identify her source for the Valerie name, which is an excellent way to become famous as a reporter because your media pals portray you as a regular Nathan Hale, who was a real spy and had only one life to give for his country but got caught and hanged by the British once because there was no 24-hour media to generate protective publicity in those days.

So, when the reporter got out, she cracked like pretty much all do and did point the finger and her employer got unhappy and because she had been kinda officious as an editor, her so-called colleagues were leaking bad stuff about her to other reporters about her pre-war writing on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, which turned out to have been wrong unlike any other newspaper story in printing history.

But those leakers didn’t get charged because nobody thinks she’s a CIA agent probably, so she has no cover to blow. Eventually, her newspaper kinda fired her, but as always it wasn’t called that because there was probably a bunch of money involved, which is that company’s favorite way of handling trouble.

So she went on to join the Manhattan Institute as a writer-researcher. And then Monday the fair and balanced news came out that Fox News has hired her as a commentator, which there sure are a lot of on television these days, most of them having been involved in government or politics and trouble, or all three. In fact, that seems to be a major qualification to become a commenting entertainer.

So now she’ll be on TV a whole bunch and, when you think about it, everything turned out just fine for everyone as it somehow always seems to do in Washington scandals because everyone gets famous and makes a whole bunch of money unlike the rest of us out here watching with our mouths open.

But all that’s gonna change for sure with the next administration. You can believe in that.

The new commentator’s name is Judith Miller. She’s 60. (Because of the secrecy thing we’ve hidden a photo of her on the jump of this item. Don’t click on the Read more line or anyone can see it.)

-- Andrew Malcolm

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