I’m a life long political junkie, a former Political Science major, a lover of political history — but in all of my life I have never ever seen a campaign like this. With things such as this, if Mitt Romney loses his bid for the Oval Office registered Republicans might consider a class action lawsuit for political negligence:
Mitt Romney’s campaign might have chosen the wrong ally to back up his attack today on President Obama for leaking national security secrets.
Shortly after the candidate’s speech in Reno, Nevada, the Romney campaign sent out a press release citing former Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Eric Edelman, who is listed as an Romney campaign advisor.
“The suggestion by Senator Dianne Feinstein, chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, that the White House was behind recent leaks of highly classified secrets, highlights the urgent need for change” Edelman said in the statement.
Edelman, however, was implicated in the country’s last major national security leak investigation — the outing of CIA agent Valerie Plame — during his time in the Bush administration.
Edelman served under former Vice President Dick Cheney in the 1990s. From February 2001 to June 2003, he worked as Principal Deputy Assistant to the Vice President for National Security Affairs, where he served directly under former Cheney aide Scooter Libby. According to the Justice Department, Edelman, identified as “Principal Deputy” in Scooter Libby’s indictment, originally suggested the idea to Libby to start leaking information about Joe Wilson’s trip to Niger.The week after Edelman’s conversation with Libby, the Cheney aide infamously told New York Times reporter Judith Miller that Wilson’s wife might work for the CIA.
Romney partisans may argue that this is being blown out of proportion, but Democrats will argue that it’s a case of the pot calling the pot a pot. The bigger issue here is: didn’t they think a report such as the one above might come out?
It is adding to the ongoing image of Camp Romney and Romney himself as a festival of breathtaking hypocrisy — even in politics where hypocrisy seems to be a prerequisite.
Presumably, Romney will vet his Vice Presidential pick a tad better than his campaign did with someone to go out front on this issue.
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.