Former CIA operative Valerie Plame’s congressional aspirations ended with a primary loss.
She was one of seven candidates seeking the Democratic nomination for New Mexico’s 3rd Congressional District, a safe Democratic seat. The current occupant in the House, Democratic Rep. Ben Ray Lujan, is running for Senate rather than seeking reelection.
With about 70% of precincts counted, Plame received 23% of the vote, while her chief Democratic primary rival, Teresa Leger Fernandez, won 43%.
The ex-spy leaned on her CIA credentials and the “Plame affair” in her campaign launch, with one campaign ad showing her driving a car like a stuntwoman.
“You name a hot spot, I lived it. Then, Dick Cheney’s chief of staff took revenge against my husband and leaked my identity,” she said in the ad. “You’ve probably heard my name.”
Plame became famous after conservative columnist Robert Novak revealed her covert identity in a 2003 column. Plame maintains that the leak of her name was “payback” from the Bush administration for her then-husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, writing an op-ed about the Bush administration on its intelligence justification for the Iraq War.
Commonly called the “Plame affair,” the scandal rocked President George W. Bush’s White House and resulted in the 2007 conviction of Lewis “Scooter” Libby, former chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney, for perjury and obstruction of justice in connection to the leak of Plame’s identity. It emerged that then-Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage was the primary source for Novak’s story, but he was never charged. President Trump pardoned Libby in 2018, saying he was treated unfairly.
Her campaign, though, was largely defined and haunted by anti-Semitic tweets that she posted in 2017.
Plame shared anti-Semitic articles from the Unz Review, including one entitled “America’s Jews Are Driving America’s Wars.” After initially defending herself, Plame apologized and resigned from the board of a grant-making fund focused on preventing the spread of nuclear weapons.
An attack ad from a “dark money” 501(c)4 nonprofit group, the Alliance to Combat Extremism Fund, that ran in the weeks before the primary centered on the tweets and praise they garnered from white supremacists.
“Disgraced, racist millionaire Valarie Plame: Is she running for Congress to represent New Mexicans or white supremacists?” the ad said, and showed a photo of Plame edited to make her pupils the shape of Nazi swastikas.
Fernandez, a lawyer and political newcomer who leaned on her deep roots in the state, received endorsements from high-profile Democrats such as Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and New Mexico Rep. Debra Haaland.
A poll sponsored by EMILY’s List released last week showed Fernandez with a 9-point lead over Plame and suggested that the ex-spy struggled to gain support from Hispanic and Native American voters.
