A Federal Judge has dismissed the lawsuit that Valerie Plame and her husband filed against several members of the Bush Administration:
A federal judge today dismissed a lawsuit filed by former CIA officer Valerie Plame and her husband against Vice President Cheney and top administration officials over the disclosure of Plame’s name and covert status to the media.
U.S. District Judge John D. Bates said that Cheney and White House aides cannot be held liable for the disclosure of information about Plame in the summer of 2003 while they were trying to rebut criticism of the administration’s war efforts levied by her husband, former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV. The judge said such efforts were certainly part of the officials’ scope of normal duties.
“The alleged tortious conduct, namely the disclosure of Mrs. Wilson’s status as a covert operative, was incidental to the kind of conduct that defendants were employed to perform,” Bates wrote in an opinion released this afternoon.
Bates also ruled that the court lacked the power to award damages for public disclosure of private information about Plame. The judge said that was because Plame and Wilson had failed to exhaust other remedies in seeking compensation from appropriate federal agencies for the alleged privacy violations.
I’m not sure about the reasoning, but the result seems correct. A private right of action for this sort of thing doesn’t seem to exist.
