President Leaky-Pants

The White House responds to a scandal that they authorized secret, politically-motivated leaks to the NY Times and other reporters...

...by authorizing a secret, politically-motivated leak to the NY Times.

Okay then.

NY Times: Bush Ordered Declassification, Official Says

A senior administration officialconfirmed for the first time on Sunday that President Bush had ordered the declassification of parts of a prewar intelligence report on Iraq in an effort to rebut critics who said the administration had exaggerated the nuclear threat posed by Saddam Hussein.

But the official said that Mr. Bush did not designate Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, I. Lewis Libby Jr., or anyone else, to release the information to reporters.

The statement by the official came after the White House had declined to confirm, for three days, Mr. Libby's grand jury testimony that he had been told by Mr. Cheney that Mr. Bush had authorized the disclosure. The official declined to be named, because of an administration policy of not commenting on issues now in court...

'Senior administration official'? 'Declined to be named'? Gee, this all looks familiar. Don't they realize that all this secrecy is what's getting them in trouble in the first place? And I'm totally sure that this new spin is waaayy truer than the last spin.

This new leak by the White House is intended to downplay Bush's role in this saga-

Moreover, the disclosure seemed intended to suggest that Mr. Bush might have played only a peripheral role in the release of the classified material and was uninformed about the specifics — like the effort to dispatch Mr. Libby to discuss the estimate with reporters.

The explanation offered Sunday left open several questions, including when Mr. Bush acted and whether he did so on the advice or at the request of Mr. Cheney. Still unclear is the nature of the communication between Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney. Also unknown is whether Mr. Bush fully realized what information Mr. Cheney planned to disclose through Mr. Libby or was aware of the precise use that Mr. Cheney intended to make of the material.

Also unknown is what makes the White House believe we will swallow any of this.

And then there's this: Bush and Cheney Discussed Plame Prior to Leak (TruthOut)

In early June 2003, Vice President Dick Cheney met with President Bush and told him that CIA officer Valerie Plame Wilson was the wife of Iraq war critic Joseph Wilson and that she was responsible for sending him on a fact-finding mission to Niger to check out reports about Iraq's attempt to purchase uranium from the African country, according to current and former White House officials and attorneys close to the investigation to determine who revealed Plame-Wilson's undercover status to the media...

...The revelation puts a new wrinkle into Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald's two-year-old criminal probe into the leak and suggests for the first time that President Bush knew from early on that the vice president and senior officials on his staff were involved in a coordinated effort to attack Wilson's credibility by leaking his wife's classified CIA status...

And so the plot thickens.

It's clear Fitzgerald has uncovered a far-reaching conspiracy and coverup and the White House is frantic to make this go away (by either spinning what happened behind-the-scenes or by sending their media operatives to smear the prosecutor himself). As I said in my last entry, it is becoming increasingly difficult for them to downplay what was initially believed in 2003 to be the random link of Plame's name by some random administration insider. The President and Vice President have been implicated as ringmasters in a massive effort to discredit Wilson, particularly by selective (and anonymous) leaks of key information to friendly reporters. Knowing that, it becomes naive to believe that this was all random and unorganized. This may be one mess that King George can't spin away.

Other blogs look at the latest developments...

Firedoglake: And The Reason Was….???

Wonkette: Senior Administration Official Guessing Game: The Case of the Meta-Leak

AmericaBlog: Bush official leaking (or lying) to spin the Bush leak

Media Matters: Media left unanswered questions about NIE disclosure

[See also previous entry- The President, The Leak, And The War- for more thoughts.]