Abu Wabu

Stephen F. Hayes on what the media aren't telling the public about Mary McCarthy and her insurrectionist pals.

The CIA did not name her, but several news organizations reported that the [fired] official was Mary McCarthy, whose most recent position at the Agency was in the office of the inspector general. Two days later, when McCarthy denied disclosing classified information to reporters, she asked a former colleague, Rand Beers, to make the statement on her behalf.

It was an interesting choice. McCarthy had worked for Beers on the National Security Council under President Bill Clinton. They had apparently remained close, even after Beers quit his position in the new administration and became a leading critic of the counterterrorism policies of George W. Bush. Or perhaps the two had remained close because Beers quit his position to criticize the Bush administration.

Beers was the senior foreign policy adviser to John Kerry's presidential campaign in 2004. In March 2004, Mary McCarthy contributed the maximum amount allowed under campaign finance laws--$2,000--to the Kerry campaign. She increased her giving as the competitive campaign drew to a close. On October 5, 2004, she gave another $5,000 to the Democratic party in Ohio, a state that many observers believed (correctly, it turned out) would decide the election. And on October 29, 2004, McCarthy gave an additional $500 to the Democratic National Committee Service Corps. Federal records show that Michael McCarthy, of the same home address, gave an additional $2,000 to the Kerry campaign and $500 to Barbara Mikulski, a Democratic senator from Maryland. In all, the McCarthy household contributed some $10,000 to Democrats during the last election cycle.

The New York Times reported McCarthy's $2,000 contribution to the Kerry campaign (but not the others), and articles sympathetic to McCarthy by the Associated Press and Newsweek at least made mention of Beers's association with the Kerry campaign. But virtually none of the other press found the facts in the preceding paragraph worth reporting.

Read it all.

And Thomas Joscelyn points out this:
Yes, She Did Leak...
From The New York Times:

A C.I.A. spokeswoman, Jennifer Millerwise Dyck, said: "The officer was terminated for precisely the reasons we have given: unauthorized contacts with reporters and sharing classified information with reporters. There is no question whatsoever that the officer did both. The officer personally admitted doing both."

The CIA's spokeswoman says that McCarthy "personally admitted" that she had "unauthorized contacts with reporters" and shared "classified information" with them.

This flies in the face of what Ms. McCarthy's surrogates are telling their contacts in the press.