Apply the “Son of Sam law” to Joe Wilson

Writing in the Weekly Standard, Fred Barnes presents the “PlameGate Hall of Shame.” Let’s skip down to the main instigator of this scandal:

Joseph Wilson, an ex-ambassador and National Security Council official in the Clinton and Bush I administrations, sparked the "leak" controversy in the first place by writing in the New York Times that Bush had lied in his 2003 State of the Union address about Saddam Hussein's seeking uranium in Africa for nuclear weapons. The CIA had sent Wilson to Niger in 2002 to check out precisely that point, and he claimed to have debunked it. Later, the Senate Intelligence Committee concluded that nearly everything Wilson wrote or said about Bush, Cheney, Iraq, and his own trip to Africa was untrue. Wilson was a fraud. "It's unfortunate that so many people took him seriously," the Washington Post editorialized sorrowfully last week.

This case goes beyond obscene dereliction of duty, which is the most generous interpretation of Wilson’s failure in Niger. There are those too-well versed in this case who believe that Wilson is the original source that revealed his wife was a covert CIA agent.

But to what end? It seems that the answer lies somewhere between treason and money.

The case for treason is that Joe Wilson arranged to have his wife send him to Niger with the deliberate intent to undermine the President’s foreign policy. When his ineptitude was made evident by the Senate Intelligence Agency, he tried to change the subject by claiming his wife was revealed as a CIA source. Now that it’s been demonstrated that the leak did not originate from the White House, Wilson only confirms his political bias by maintaining a lawsuit against Karl Rove et. al., but not Richard Armitage, the original Novak source.

But maybe the reason for Wilson’s shenanigans boil down to nothing more mundane than the almighty dollar. Once a no-name ambassador, Wilson is now the toast of the nutroots Left, with a fawning spread in Vanity Fair and a space on George Soros’s speed-dial. It’s no secret that he and his wife have been shopping publishers for a book deal and they continue to solicit cash for their legal case. For somebody who puts on the supercilious air of a diplomat, Wilson sure is grabby with the speaking fees.

Assuming it’s all about the Benjamins for Wilson & Plame, what recourse is there against a man who purposely undermined U.S. policy, leading to a Senate rebuke and a costly two-year investigation by Patrick Fitzgerald? Perhaps it’s time to revisit the “Son of Sam” law:

A Son of Sam law is a law designed to keep criminals from profiting from their crimes by selling their stories to publishers. Such laws authorize the state to seize all money earned from such a deal and use it to compensate the criminal's victims.

It would be a delicious denoument to the whole Wilson/Plame affair (if that darned Supreme Court didn’t rule it unconstitutional). Then again, it might be fun to see how many weeks it would take for Joe Wilson’s book to hit the bargain bins.