Former CIA operative Valerie Plame, a Democrat, is running for an open House seat in New Mexico.
Plame, whose CIA cover was blown in 2003, was considering running for the Senate but is instead aiming for the seat held by Representative Ben Ray Lujan, who is seeking to fill the Senate vacancy created by retiring Democratic Sen. Tom Udall.
“My career in the CIA was cut short by partisan politics, but I’m not done serving our country,” Plame said in a Thursday statement.
Plame, 55, shot to fame when she was during President George W. Bush’s administration after her husband Ambassador Joe Wilson wrote in the New York Times that he believed “some of the intelligence related to Iraq’s nuclear weapons program was twisted to exaggerate the Iraqi threat.” Plame and Wilson divorced in 2017.
Conservative columnist Robert Novak revealed Plame’s identity in a 2003 column, attributing the information to “two senior administration officials.” Plame maintains that the leak was “payback” from the Bush administration for her then-husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, writing an op-ed questioning the validity of the administration’s intelligence used as a basis for the Iraq War.
Lewis “Scooter” Libby, former chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney, was convicted in 2007 of perjury and obstruction of justice over the leak of Plame’s identity. It emerged that former 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.
Plame has since written two spy novels and a memoir.
“When my career in national security intelligence was ended prematurely, through no fault of my own, there was only one place my heart wanted to be — Sante Fe,” Plame said in her statement. “I moved the day after Vice President Cheney’s chief aide Scooter Libby was convicted for his role in outing my true CIA identity. … New Mexico was the first place that felt like home and that’s what it has been ever since.”
Plame said healthcare access and prescription drug costs were the primary reasons she is running.
In 2017, Plame was forced to apologize after sharing on Twitter an anti-Semitic article from the UNZ Review entitled “America’s Jews Are Driving America’s Wars.” The article stated that Jews “own the media,” that they should wear labels while on national television, and that their beliefs were as dangerous as “a bottle of rat poison.”
Her initial response was: “First of all, calm down. Re-tweets don’t imply endorsement. Yes, very provocative, but thoughtful. Many neocon hawks ARE Jewish.” But she later added: “OK folks, look, I messed up. I skimmed this piece, zeroed in on the neocon criticism, and shared it without seeing and considering the rest.”
She later apologized and resigned from the board of the Ploughshares Fund, which provides grants for projects aimed at preventing the spread of nuclear weapons. But in the space of three years, she had posted nine UNZ articles, including one titled “Why I Still Dislike Israel” and another about “Dancing Israelis” on 9/11.
Plame has been an outspoken critic of President Trump, launching a GoFundMe effort to buy a stake so she could ban Trump. It raised $89,719 toward its $1 billion goal. She has been active in Democratic politics since moving to Santa Fe, N.M., in 2007. She hosted a fundraiser for Hillary Clinton’s super PAC in 2014 and another fundraiser for Clinton’s presidential campaign in 2015.
