Three weeks ago, on the eve of a White House summit involving the Iraqi prime minister, a classified memo by a senior Bush aide was leaked to the press. The memo, penned by national security adviser Stephen Hadley, questioned the willingness and ability of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Al-Maliki to help U.S. interests.
But when a reporter today asked Bush — who’s made no secret of his intolerance for leaks — whether he or his staff had called for an investigation into the leak, the president pleaded ignorance on the subject.
“You know, there may be an ongoing investigation of this, I just don’t know. If there is, if I knew about it, it’s not fresh in my mind. . .
“And we’ve had a lot of leaks, Mark,” Bush continued, “as you know, some of them out of â I don’t know where they’re from, therefore I’m not gonna speculate.”
The Bush administration has not been shy about going after leaks when it wants to: the New York Times is facing an investigation into who leaked its reporters details of the secret NSA domestic wiretapping program. At the time, Bush denied a personal role in ordering that probe.
