By Sunday morning, it was a different story. The traders put the
chances of indictment at 62 percent for Rove and 88 percent for Libby.
The sudden change of heart coincided with stories in Sunday’s New York
Times giving details of the grand jury testimony of its reporter Judith
Miller.

She was repeatedly asked about receiving classified information from
Libby, a line of questioning that sounded as if the prosecutor, Patrick
Fitzgerald, was looking for a violation of the espionage act. If that
is the prosecutor’s strategy, he may well have a case against Libby and
Rove for disclosing classified information.

But why stop with them? A prosecutor could indict just about anyone
inside or outside government who deals with defense or foreign-policy
information that could harm the U.S. The law could apply to reporters
who hear this kind of classified information every day if they
”willfully communicate” it to their editors.

”Tripping across classified information is unavoidable,” said David
Sanger, a White House reporter for The Times. ”You can’t discuss
policy questions without getting to the underlying facts behind the
policies, and the crucial facts are often classified.”

Fortunately, the law has rarely been enforced, although its use in a
few recent cases has journalists worried that it’s turning into the
American version of the British Official Secrets Act. If it’s used
against Libby and Rove, the lesson for government officials would be:
stop talking to reporters.

The lesson for the public would be: stop appointing special
prosecutors. The job can turn a reasonable lawyer into an inquisitor
with the zeal of Captain Ahab — even more zeal, actually, because
he’ll keep hunting even after he learns there’s no whale. He’ll settle
for anything else he can scare up.

This case, if you can remember that far back, began with accusations
that White House officials violated a law protecting undercover agents
who could be harmed or killed if their identities were revealed. But it
now seems doubtful that there was a violation of that law, much less
any danger to the outed agent, Valerie Wilson.

The case originally aroused indignation because the White House
appeared to be outing Wilson as part of a campaign to unfairly
discredit her husband, Joseph Wilson, who accused the administration of
ignoring his 2002 report debunking evidence that Iraq was trying to
acquire material for nuclear weapons. But a Senate investigation found
that his report not only failed to reach the White House but also
failed to debunk the nuclear-material evidence — in fact, most
analysts concluded the report added to the evidence.

So now the original justifications for the investigation have vanished,
which is why I think of this as the Nadagate scandal. But the
prosecutor has kept at it for two years. Besides switching to the vague
law against disclosing classified information, he might indict Libby or
Rove for perjury or obstruction of justice — crimes that occurred only
because of the investigation.

Perjury, of course, was the charge that Kenneth Starr accurately pinned
on Bill Clinton, but the public didn’t buy it. People realized that
whatever the affair and the cover-up said about Clinton’s character and
judgment, the scandal was not a crime.

Unless Fitzgerald comes up with something unexpected, neither is
Nadagate. For now, it looks as if the outing of Valerie Wilson was done
by officials who didn’t think it was illegal and believed they were
replying truthfully to a partisan who had smeared them. Hardball
politics isn’t pretty, but it’s not criminal, either.

Maybe we’re all misreading Fitzgerald’s diligence. One former federal
prosecutor now in private practice told me that Fitzgerald might just
be protecting himself, investigating every conceivable offense before
concluding that whatever corners were cut, there’s no reason to indict.