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1. She should not have been outed period. Political, non-political, it still compromised the cases she was working on when she was overseas. Counterintelligence is a nastier business than clandestine operations. If counter-intel officials overseas could place people with her, no matter how long ago, they would come under investigation for espionage. The punishment for espionage in most other countries is execution (for treason). Here, it wavers between life in prison and the death penalty.
2. CIA officials will say anything to get people out of their business. It's highly common to see people doing a "home tour" at HQ or people that are home indefinitely to get put on a TDY tour if they're the person that best fits the job. People that are supposed to be on a home tour for two years have been sent back out within weeks of the start of their tour. While they say it's "highly unlikely," there's no such thing as that amount of certainty until a clandestine officer retires completely. And while she may not have been part of a covert operation at the time, she has been part of several covert operations that were all compromised by her outing. If she'd been retired for quite some time, it wouldn't be that big a deal, but she was not retired. Many clandestine officers have published memoirs, but any recent memoir on recent operations have huge redacted portions that compromise missions if they're published.
3. The politics of all of this is astounding, I agree with you on that. I think had there not been as much media attention, they'd be able to salvage some of the relationships with assets overseas. They've undermined CIA operations, the safety of assets and field officers alike, the government's foreign policy decisions (whether or not you or I as citizens agree with them is an entirely different thread), the legitimacy of the VP's office as traditionally NOT a place of leaks (traditionally, Congress is seen as the main source of leaks)... and so on. It's really sickening.
That doesn't mean that I don't want to see someone come to justice for it all.
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