A Little Help Here (UPDATED)

Big surprise: people still can’t give up hawking the Plame “scandal” even when the basic premise of it are held up against the very objective law:

(4) The term "covert agent" means

(A) a present or retired officer or employee of an intelligence agency or a present or retired member of the Armed Forces assigned to duty with an intelligence agency

(i) whose identity as such an officer, employee, or member is classified information, and

(ii) who is serving outside the United States or has within the last five years served outside the United States; or

(B) a United States citizen whose intelligence relationship to the United States is classified information, and

(i) who resides and acts outside the United States as an agent of, or informant or source of operational assistance to, an intelligence agency, or

(ii) who is at the time of the disclosure acting as an agent of, or informant to, the foreign counterintelligence or foreign counterterrorism components of the Federal Bureau of Investigation; or

(C) an individual, other than a United States citizen, whose past or present intelligence relationship to the United States is classified information and who is a present or former agent of, or a present or former informant or source of operational assistance to, an intelligence agency.

(All emphasis mine.)

Please, someone, tell which category Ms. Plame falls under when she went to work everyday at CIA Headquarters in Langley, Virginia. You can't break a law by outing a person as a covert agent when they do not meet the standards of that very same law which defines the term 'covert agent.'

Meanwhile Sandy Berger, he of the pants stuffed with classified documents, still has not been sentenced.

Asked why Berger wasn't sentenced as scheduled [for stealing and destroying top secret terrorism documents from the National Archives, to which he plead guilty] on Friday, July 8, a Justice Department spokesman told NewsMax on Tuesday that Berger's sentencing has been postponed till September.

Um, JD spokesman, that doesn’t answer the question ‘why.’

Berger Begs
Asking the Experts?
More on Berger

(Thanks to Instapundit)

UPDATE: One question answered. Note the source.

WASHINGTON — The alleged crime at the heart of a controversy that has consumed official Washington — the "outing" of a CIA officer — may not have been a crime at all under federal law, little-noticed details in a book by the agent's husband suggest.

In The Politics of Truth, former ambassador Joseph Wilson writes that he and his future wife both returned from overseas assignments in June 1997. Neither spouse, a reading of the book indicates, was again stationed overseas. They appear to have remained in Washington, D.C., where they married and became parents of twins. [SNIP]

The column's date is important because the law against unmasking the identities of U.S. spies says a "covert agent" must have been on an overseas assignment "within the last five years." The assignment also must be long-term, not a short trip or temporary post, two experts on the law say. Wilson's book makes numerous references to the couple's life in Washington over the six years up to July 2003.

(All emphasis mine.)

(Thanks to James Taranto)