Briefly: This came about after President Bush claimed in the January 28, 2003 State of the Union speech that Saddam Hussein recently sought uranium in Africa for a nuclear weapons program (see highlighted section). The ambassador who was sent on a fact-finding mission about this intelligence prior to the speech, Joseph Wilson, found the documents were falsified, and relayed this to the administration. When he heard the president claim something other than what he had found, he wrote an op-ed in the New York Times entitled "What I Didn't Find in Africa."

Shortly thereafter, Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, was outed in the press as a deep-cover CIA agent working on weapons of mass destruction. Wilson didn't even know what she was working on, but someone from the administration leaked the information to a number of reporters. The only one to publish the information was conservative columnist and CNN pundit Robert Novak. He and others, like Judith Miller of the New York Times, refused to name the administration source who leaked the information; betraying the identity of a CIA agent is considered a treasonous offense, and giving the name of an administration source could mean losing access to a source of information --whether that information was correct or not was another story. Miller did time in jail for not revealing her source.

Novak cut a deal with Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald, who was assigned to the case, and got some kind of immunity. The stress did lead to his leaving CNN (he snapped on camera). Eventually Miller's source said she could reveal his identity, and it was Vice President Dick Cheney's Chief of Staff I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby.

The most recent information to emerge from the grand jury is that Libby was authorized to leak Plame's identity by Dick Cheney, who claimed to have double-checked this with the president beforehand. The argument is that the president declassified Plame's status in order to leak it to the public without violating any secrecy laws. However, this is the line of argument as of April, 2006; in over two years of testimony, this never before came out. Libby has been indicted for lying to the grand jury.