Washington – President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney authorized Cheney’s top aide to launch a counterattack of leaks against administration critics on Iraq by feeding intelligence information to reporters, according to court papers citing the aide’s testimony in the CIA leak case.
The court filing by special counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald for the first time places Bush and Cheney at the heart of what Lewis “Scotter” Libby testified was an exceptional and deliberate leak of material designed to buttress the administration’s claim that Iraq was trying to obtain nuclear weapons.
“The buck doesn’t stop anywhere with this White House. Now we know why the president hasn’t been straight with Americans,” said Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass. “Two and a half years ago, President Bush said, ‘If there is a leak out of my administration, I want to know who it is.’ He said he’d fire whoever leaked classified information, and now we know the president himself authorized it. Now we know that the president’s search for the leaker needs to go no further than a mirror.”
The information was contained in the National Intelligence Estimate, one of the most closely held CIA analyses of whether Iraq had weapons of mass destruction before the war.
Fitzgerald said Libby’s disclosure took place as the result of “a strong desire by many, including multiple people in the White House, to repudiate” claims made in a July 2003 newspaper article by former Ambassador Joseph Wilson who was hired by the CIA to evaluate whether Iraq sought nuclear material in Niger.
Wilson wrote that “some of the intelligence related to Iraq’s nuclear-weapons program was twisted to exaggerate the Iraqi threat.”
The White House did not challenge Thursday the prosecutor’s account of Bush and Cheney’s role in orchestrating the effort to discredit Wilson.
Both Bush and Cheney have been interviewed by Fitzgerald, but the details of what they told him are unknown.
Fitzgerald’s new account is based on Libby’s grand-jury testimony that Cheney told him Bush had authorized the declassification and disclosure of some of the information.
Bush has been a major critic of leaks of classified information and his aides have repeatedly said they want to “get to the bottom” of who leaked the name of Wilson’s wife, covert CIA operative Valerie Plame, to the media, which touched off Fitzgerald’s investigation.
But in the past 33 months the White House has never disclosed Bush’s apparent involvement in the deliberate disclosure of information meant to undermine Wilson.
Three months before Fitzgerald began his probe in December 2003, Bush said at a news conference that “I’ve constantly expressed my displeasure with leaks, particularly leaks of classified information. … If there’s a leak out of the administration, I want to know who it is. And if a person has violated law, the person will be taken care of.”
Fitzgerald has not charged anyone with wrongdoing in the initial leak of Plame’s name. In the new filing, he did not allege that Bush authorized that disclosure, and said Bush was “unaware of the role” that Libby, then Cheney’s chief of staff, played in discussing her name with a number of reporters.
The revelation of Bush’s role in the disclosure effort set off an intense political debate Thursday over the propriety of the White House’s use of intelligence information to undermine a critic. Democratic lawmakers lined up to demand that Bush explain his involvement in an affair they called unprecedented.
“If the disclosure is true, it’s breathtaking. The president is revealed as the leaker-in-chief,” said Rep. Jane Harman, D-Calif., the senior Democrat on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.
Legal scholars and analysts said Thursday that the president has the authority to declassify intelligence reports selectively.
But they also said it was highly unusual for senior officials at the White House to take such an action so stealthily, without notifying Cabinet officials or others in the administration, including the CIA authors of the National Intelligence Estimate.
According to Fitzgerald’s account, Libby believed that only he, Bush and Cheney knew about the calculated disclosure.
Even then-deputy national-security adviser Stephen Hadley was kept in the dark and wasted efforts trying separately to “declassify what Mr. Libby testified had already been declassified.”
Libby, meanwhile, told the reporters he contacted that the declassified information could not be attributed to him.
