We may soon learn the answer...

... to the Rhetorical Question: How much shit can one fan take?

Tenet Resigns

CIA Director George J. Tenet has submitted his resignation and will leave the agency in mid-July, President Bush announced today.

Bush and CIA officials said the resignation was for personal reasons. The CIA officials denied that Tenet quit or was pressured to leave because of criticism of U.S. intelligence over the failed search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq or missed clues to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist plot.

My sister is reminding me of the Plame Investigation chronology here. To recap: Wilson publishs his NYTimes Op-Ed in May-June. In July, Novak outs Wilson's wife as undercover CIA in July. Within the next few days, the CIA forwarded a referral to the Justice Department for a criminal investigation. Two weeks later, they followed the referral with a damage assessment on the outing.

Then for months, nothing, repeat nothing happened. Only when a Senior Administration Official leaked to the WashPost that two White House officials were shopping the Plame info around to at least six reporters. It was only then that the crime got the attention it deserved. I refer you to this WashPost article of Sept 28:

At CIA Director George J. Tenet's request, the Justice Department is looking into an allegation that administration officials leaked the name of an undercover CIA officer to a journalist, government sources said yesterday.

...

Yesterday, a senior administration official said that before Novak's column ran, two top White House officials called at least six Washington journalists and disclosed the identity and occupation of Wilson's wife. Wilson had just revealed that the CIA had sent him to Niger last year to look into the uranium claim and that he had found no evidence to back up the charge. Wilson's account touched off a political fracas over Bush's use of intelligence as he made the case for attacking Iraq.

"Clearly, it was meant purely and simply for revenge," the senior official said of the alleged leak.

It's always been my theory (and Josh Marshall's) that 'Senior Administration Official' was George Tenet, pissed off at the cavalier way the administration was ignoring the criminal referral.

And now we hear that witnesses told the Plame Grand Jury that both Bush and Rove knew of the outing in advance

Witnesses told a federal grand jury President George W. Bush knew about, and took no action to stop, the release of a covert CIA operative's name to a journalist in an attempt to discredit her husband, a critic of administration policy in Iraq.

Their damning testimony has prompted Bush to contact an outside lawyer for legal advice because evidence increasingly points to his involvement in the leak of covert CIA operative Valerie Plame's name to syndicated columnist Robert Novak.

The move suggests the president anticipates being questioned by prosecutors. Sources say grand jury witnesses have implicated the President and his top advisor, Karl Rove.

But I think it's important to remember this simple creed: Impeach Cheney first