No one is likely to face criminal charges for actually leaking CIA secrets even after a US jury found a former top aide to Vice President Dick Cheney guilty of lying and obstructing a probe into the affair.
Just after the conviction on Tuesday of former White House aide Lewis "Scooter" Libby, prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald told reporters the leak investigation was over and would not extend to other administration officials.
"I would not expect to see any further charges filed," he said. The trial stemmed from a probe into the unmasking of Valerie Plame as a CIA operative in 2003 after her husband, Joseph Wilson, accused the Bush administration of manipulating intelligence on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction to build its case for war.
Libby faces a maximum 25 years in prison for obstructing the Plame leak probe, perjury before a grand jury and making false statements to the FBI.
No charges were brought for actually leaking Plame's name. Federal law makes it a crime to knowingly reveal the identity of a covert agent. Some suggested Libby was merely a scapegoat for higher-ups.
Juror Denis Collins said many jurors felt that other officials who leaked Plame's name to reporters, such as senior White House aide Karl Rove, should have been on trial. "There was a tremendous amount of sympathy for Mr Libby on the jury," Collins said. "It was said a number of times, 'What are we doing with this guy here? Where's Rove... where are these other guys?'" Plame's lawyers planned to pursue their own civil case against Cheney, Libby and Rove among others.
"Disturbing facts emerged from the criminal trial that are highly relevant to the civil case," the legal team said in a statement. "For example ... details of how Vice President Cheney orchestrated the concerted White House effort to discredit and retaliate against Joe Wilson," it said.
The guilty verdict was the latest in a series of setbacks for the Bush administration's Iraq war policy, including flawed intelligence on weapons of mass destruction, a failure to contain a violent insurgency and sectarian strife, prisoner abuses and an outcry over treatment of US war wounded. Critics of President George W. Bush had seized on the Libby trial as showing heavy-handed White House tactics, and accused the administration of hypocrisy over its promises of clean government.
In June 2004, Bush pledged to fire anyone shown to have leaked information that exposed the identity of Plame, but at other times he softened the pledge by saying he would fire any leaker who committed a crime. Anthony Corrado Jr., professor of government at Colby College in Waterville, Maine, predicted the outcome would raise more questions about Cheney, long regarded as one of the most powerful people in the Bush administration. "Certainly the investigation raised a cloud about the vice president, and this conviction does nothing to diminish that cloud. It will lead to speculation about exactly what role the vice president played in this," Corrado said.