[Mb-civic] All the President's Leaks - E. J. Dionne - Washington Post Op-Ed

[William Swiggard]

All the President's Leaks
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By E. J. Dionne Jr.
The Washington Post
Tuesday, April 11, 2006; A21

What's amazing about the defenses offered for President Bush in the 
Valerie Plame leak investigation is that they deal with absolutely 
everything except the central issue: Did Bush know a lot more about this 
case than he let on before the 2004 elections?

But first, let's offer full credit to the Bush spin operation for 
working so hard and so effectively to change the subject.

The news was the court filing by Special Counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald 
reporting that Bush, through Vice President Cheney, had authorized I. 
Lewis "Scooter" Libby to leak sensitive intelligence information in July 
2003 to discredit claims made by former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV.

Wilson had fired a direct shot at the White House's rationale for the 
war in Iraq by saying the administration had distorted intelligence 
concerning Saddam Hussein's supposed efforts to obtain nuclear 
materials. The threat that Hussein might go nuclear was an emotional 
centerpiece of the administration's case for war. Condoleezza Rice, then 
Bush's national security adviser, made the case with great dramatic 
effect on Sept. 8, 2002: "We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom 
cloud."

The president's defenders want you to think that when it comes to 
leaking, every president does it. Why should Bush be held to a different 
standard? Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) told CNN on Sunday that the Bush 
administration was innocently asking itself, "How do we get the full 
story out there?"

Besides, since the president can authorize the declassification of 
anything he chooses to declassify, he can't be involved in anything 
untoward. "This was not a leak," Joseph diGenova, a top Republican 
lawyer, told the New York Sun's Josh Gerstein. "This was an authorized 
disclosure." Ah, yes, it depends on what the meaning of the word "leak" 
is. That sounds familiar, doesn't it?

These arguments merely distract attention from why Fitzgerald's 
disclosure was so important. When a fuss was kicked up in the fall of 
2003 about the leaking of the name of Wilson's wife, former CIA 
operative Valerie Plame, to the media earlier in the year, the president 
spoke and acted as if he knew nothing and was incensed that any leaking 
was going on in his administration.

In its issue of Oct. 13, 2003, Time magazine quoted Bush as saying: 
"Listen, I know of nobody -- I don't know of anybody in my 
administration who leaked classified information." Then the magazine's 
writers made an observation that turns out to be prescient: "Bush," they 
wrote, "seemed to emphasize those last two words as if hanging on to a 
legal life preserver in choppy seas."

The key words here are classified information. Did Bush at the time he 
made that statement know perfectly well that Cheney and Libby were 
involved with the leak, but that it didn't involve "classified 
information" because the president himself had authorized them to act? 
Talk about a legalistic defense.

Could it be that Bush -- heading into what he knew would be a difficult 
election -- was creating the impression of wanting the full story out 
when he already knew what most of the story was?

Which leads to another question: What exactly did Attorney General John 
Ashcroft know when he recused himself from the leak investigation? Did 
he know the investigation was getting dangerously close to Bush, Cheney, 
Libby and White House senior political adviser Karl Rove?

In announcing Fitzgerald's appointment on Dec. 30, 2003, Deputy Attorney 
General James Comey said that Ashcroft, "in an abundance of caution, 
believed that his recusal was appropriate based on the totality of the 
circumstances and the facts and evidence developed at this stage of the 
investigation." What were the "facts" and the "evidence" on which 
Ashcroft acted? Did the administration consciously consider if passing 
off the investigation to someone else would delay the day of reckoning 
to beyond the 2004 election? And, yes, what exactly did Bush tell 
Fitzgerald and his staff when they questioned him on June 24, 2004? What 
had Cheney told Fitzgerald earlier?

The most heartening sign that all the spin in the world will not allow 
the administration to evade such questions was Senate Judiciary 
Committee Chairman Arlen Specter's statement on Fox News Sunday that 
"there has to be a detailed explanation precisely as to what Vice 
President Cheney did, what the president said to him, and an explanation 
from the president as to what he said so that it can be evaluated." 
Specter, a Republican and a former district attorney in Philadelphia, is 
just the right man to take the lead in breaking the spin cycle.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/10/AR2006041001049.html
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