Former CIA operative Valerie Plame has claimed she had no idea that an article entitled “America’s Jews Are Driving America’s Wars” from a website run by a Holocaust denier, which she retweeted in 2017, was anti-Semitic
Plame, who announced last week she is running for an open House seat in New Mexico, called the misstep “a doozy” — the same term she used in a 2017 apology — in an interview with MSNBC on Sunday. “I’m human and we all make mistakes. It was just a doozy, and it was very public,” Plame said.
“Let me be clear, it’s not who I am and it’s not what I believe. It was extremely painful, I had not read the whole article all the way through and when I realized what it was, it was embarrassing and hurtful. So I apologize deeply and sincerely. I’ve [apologized] multiple times both privately and publicly. It was really just a painful period but I want to move forward. That’s not who I am,” she said.
Plame, 55, has insisted that she was unfamiliar with the source of the anti-Semitic article the website for The Unz Review, run by Ron Unz, who has denied the Holocaust. But since 2014 it had posted nine UNZ articles including one titled “Why I Still Dislike Israel” and another about “Dancing Israelis” on 9/11. The Anti-Defamation League has described The Unz Review as an “outlet for certain writers to attack Israel and Jews” which the Federalist characterized it as “a mix of far-right and far-left anti-Semitic crackpottery.”
The identity of Plame was revealed in 2003 by columnist Robert Novak. She maintains that the leak was “payback” from the George W. Bush administration for her then-husband, former Ambassador Joe Wilson, writing an op-ed questioning the validity of the administration’s intelligence used as a basis for the Iraq War — though an investigation by special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald did not back this up.
She reiterated her apology on CNN and said her decision to share the article was stupid because she had only skimmed it. “The only thing that I focused on in that article was I thought it was a very bad idea to get out of the Iran nuclear deal. That’s very much what I was focused on. I stupidly did not read the rest of the article and when I did, I was really horrified. It’s anti-Semitic. That has no place, at any time, anywhere.”
