The Leaky Bush Administration

So Mr Bush who hates leakers turns out to be THE LEAKER in the Scooter Libby affair. Mr Bush is apparently not culpable for breaking the law since he declassified this intelligence info on the fly when giving it to the VP for Scooter to give to NYT reporter Judith Miller. But what about the President's pledge to fire any leakers he found. Is he going to fire himself? I sure wish he would.

The second thing to consider is that Bush, Cheney and Libby were aware or should have been aware that the intelligence they were using had largely been discredited. Still if the overriding concern was to butress a justification for the Iraq war it would have served their purposes well to put this information into the hands of gullible NY Times reporter Judy Miller.

Finally, can the President legally blow the cover of a CIA operative? While I have no problem with the President being able to declassify intelligence information on the fly ( especially in an emergency), I do have a problem with him blowing the cover of a CIA operative as happened in the Plame case. If the information about Ms. Plame went from President Bush to Vice President Cheney to his then Chief of Staff I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby and on to Ms. Miller of the Times then the President appears to be in violation of Federal law.