To the administration and Republicans running for Congress, the continued controversy — and news coverage — about President George Bush himself leaking what had previously been classified information to the press is a bleeding wound that won’t stop.
To Democrats and other critics of the administration, it’s a gift that keeps on giving.
Will this latest via the New York Times below halt the bleeding and/or stop the gift horse in its tracks? Or will it not have much impact since Bush is now being accused of something more fundamental than just using government information to get back at critics: he’s being accused of being a political hypocrite who says one thing in public and does another thing behind-the-scenes:
A senior administration official confirmed 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.
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.
Why the delay? Clearly, the White House was trying to ride this one out but the heat has been too great. MORE:
The official declined to be named, because of an administration policy of not commenting on issues now in court. The disclosure appeared intended to bolster the White House argument that Mr. Bush was acting well within his legal authority when he ordered that key conclusions of the classified National Intelligence Estimate, which was completed in the fall of 2002, should be revealed to make clear that intelligence agencies believed Mr. Hussein was seeking uranium in Africa.
Moreover, the disclosure seemed intended to suggest that Mr. Bush may 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.
There are two possibilities here: (1) the latter is true, (2)this is a classic case of plausible deniability. MORE:
Before the invasion of Iraq, the information from the intelligence report was used by both Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney to bolster their argument that Mr. Hussein posed a threat, and was reconstituting a nuclear program that was dismantled after the 1991 Gulf War.
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.
Blogger Ed Morrissey feels this info basically clears Bush. And some will dispute that. But he also makes this point:
It hardly appears that the wagons are getting circled at the White House as far as Dick Cheney is concerned. It didn’t take long for sources within the administration to get this story out and point the finger right back to Dick Cheney. As long as Bush declassified the information, nothing Cheney did under these circumstances was illegal … but the White House does not seem to care about throwing Cheney under a bus to absorb the embarrassment this has created. (It’s also important to remember that Cheney also has authority to declassify information on his own.)
Does this mean anything? We know that Cheney and his office have created a few PR problems of late for the administration. This may be a signal from the President’s team that patience with the VP’s staff has come to an end, if not the VP himself. It certainly doesn’t show unity between the two to have this kind of finger-pointing coming so soon after this story broke.
If this is indeed what’s happening, it may be because the pressures have been mounting on GWB to give more info about precisely what he leaked and why. For instance, on Sunday two key Republicans seemed to put as much space between themselves and the administration as they would if they had encountered a bird with bird flu:
A senior Republican U.S. senator said President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney owe the public a “specific explanation” of their involvement in disclosing classified information to rebut Iraq war critics.
“It is necessary for the president and the vice president to tell the American people exactly what happened,” Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter said on the “Fox News Sunday” program. Bush may have had authority to declassify intelligence material “but that was not the right way to go about it because we ought not to have leaks in government.”
Another ranking Republican lawmaker, House Majority Leader John Boehner, declined to defend the administration’s leaking of information in 2003, saying, “I don’t have the facts.”
Not a good sign when the Majority Leader isn’t out there defending you.
Meanwhile, the President continued to get a beating in the press. Note this USA Today editorial:
President Bush’s quest to muzzle leakers in his administration has always looked a bit odd. In the most charitable interpretation, it’s a naïve waste of time and resources. Leaks are part of every administration, and Bush’s claims that national security has been undermined appear dubious at best.
In a less forgiving light, the effort can be cast as a Nixonesque attempt to intimidate anyone who dares interfere with administration policy by disclosing facts that it is hiding. Among the leaks that angered Bush most have been disclosures that the administration was engaging in wiretaps without court approval and that someone in the administration leaked the identity of a CIA operative.
The latest news from the leak front, if true, just makes the whole effort look foolish.
After two unproductive years, the federal investigation into the 2003 leak of the operative’s identity has finally come full circle to wound the instigator of the probe himself — the president….
The paper notes that Presidential declassification is not unusual or a sing but “first, the White House cherry-picked pieces to prop up its case and leaked them to a favored reporter.” It declares:
There’s nothing unusual about the White House spinning facts to make itself look good. But leaking classified information, then decrying other leaks and sending prosecutors to hunt down the leakers just underscores the absurdity of the entire exercise….Just about everyone touched by this CIA leak investigation looks bad, including now the president.
Perhaps all of this explains the sudden rush to damage control after remaining silent (when will this and other administrations learn that not answering charges is like letting an infected wound build up more pus). The Christian Science Monitor has a report containing the views of an expert this site quotes quite often — an political analyst who has an excellent analytical track record:
The president is not accused of illegality. And no one questions his legal right to declassify information. But critics are now charging Mr. Bush with hypocrisy – a development that makes efforts to put his presidency back on track all the more daunting.
“Here’s why this hurts: It reminds people again that the intelligence was bad and we’re in Iraq without end for some of the wrong reasons, and that’s at the heart of his 36 percent,” says Larry Sabato, a professor of politics at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, referring to Bush’s job approval rating in recent polls.
To be sure, leaking is a political fine art. But Bush’s growing credibility problem is the political context within which it must be viewed. It’s one more big “drip” in a drip-drip-drip of credibility problems that seems to literally grow bigger with a seeming Revelation of The Week on some topic or another. The LA Times:
More broadly, the leak controversy may be only a small part of a larger problem: a continuing erosion of public confidence in the president’s credibility, especially on Iraq, which has become the defining issue of his presidency.
In public, the White House and the Republican National Committee dismissed the controversy as a partisan sideshow. Bush doesn’t have a credibility problem, spokesman Scott McClellan said; “the Democrats have a credibility problem when they try to suggest that we were manipulating intelligence.” But independent pollsters and political scientists — as well as some Republican strategists — disagree.
“This kind of story hits at one of the president’s few remaining strengths, the perception that he is principled,” said Christopher Gelpi of Duke University, who has generally been sympathetic to the White House. “The president’s credibility on Iraq is already low outside the Republican Party, and this digs the hole deeper.”
Said Republican pollster Tony Fabrizio: “This isn’t good. When your image is being battered on a host of other issues, the one thing you don’t need is a question of veracity.”
However, he added: “Let’s not exaggerate the importance of this…. By no stretch of the imagination is this Nixon-esque.”
Perhaps not…but it’s getting there.
And in one sense it’s worse than Nixon’s: in recent months Bush and his administration have faced after-the-fact credibility problems on
several issues — not just a big, main one such as Nixon had with Watergate. Each issue adds to the impression (except among his most lock-step supporters who basically react like defense attorneys) that officials statements from this administration need to be taken with a chunk of salt as big as from a dried up portion of the Dead Sea. When an official gives an explanation, it must be parsed. If an official statement has a loophole or isn’t completely, it must be noted.
Will these latest reports be enough to stem the political hemorrhage? If there aren’t more new damaging revelations in this case or on other issues, yes.
But so far the track record of this administration is that there’s always some new controversy involving a disconnect between word and deed — which is the problem George Bush is facing here and in the long run. More and more voters noting that disconnect.
UPDATE: Read the always unique The Talking Dog’s blunt take (he is an attorney). Read it in full but here’s a small section:
I’ll bottom line it for you: the President who said he had no idea who the leaker is but he wanted to find and deal with the leaker and whose Administration wants to radically increase efforts to seek criminal penalties for leaks and handed over incredibly sensitive intelligence data willy nilly to Judith Miller to politically justify its decision to go to war in Iraq and to discredit political opponent Joe Wilson, and of course, to keep things stirred up just over a year before the 2004 presidential election.
Got all that? Of course you did– you knew it already. No need to “hear everyone out”. We know the facts: the White House has chosen not to deny them. We needn’t hear the justification for those facts– we know that too. “We’re at war” will be what we’ll hear, and therefore, “good leaks protect us” whereas “bad leaks threaten us”.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.