Waxman wants answers from President Bush on his new declassification in the greater interests of George W. Bush’s reelection policy.
TPM Reader NH tells us that on Hardball earlier this hour David Gregory repeated the canard that Joe Wilson claimed that Dick Cheney had “ordered” him to go to Niger or personally authorized the trip.
Anyone else catch that? Do we have to help David out?
Treasury Secretary John Snow’s firing to be delayed a few weeks longer.
Here’s a question. If I understand this right, Scooter Libby has sworn under oath that Vice President Cheney told him that President Bush had authorized him to disclose classified information.
Let’s set aside the whole question of whether the president can do that or whether there’s a specific procedure he has to follow. Just set that issue aside.
If it isn’t true that Vice President Cheney told him that, then Vice President Cheney must know that Libby has again perjured himself. I would think the Vice President has an affirmative duty to come forward and say that Libby’s testimony is false.
I just overheard Jeff Toobin on CNN saying that the White House will probably be able to squelch this story simply by ‘no commenting’ it. But can we not fairly draw the inference from Cheney’s silence that he did in fact tell Libby this?
By a slightly looser logic — and one in which sworn testimony doesn’t come into play in the same fashion — doesn’t President Bush’s silence tell us that Cheney was telling the truth?
Bush: When I do it, it’s not a leak.
From the Post …
A senior administration official, speaking on background because White House policy prohibits comment on an active investigation, said Bush sees a distinction between leaks and what he is alleged to have done. The official said Bush authorized the release of the classified information to assure the public of his rationale for war as it was coming under increasing scrutiny.
Okay, then.
The Onion, though you wouldn’t know it: “In the wake of several major lobbying scandals, the Senate Select Committee on Ethics announced Tuesday that it will hold a special series of intensive sessions inside its recently completed 200-room Ethics Mansion.”
Here’s this morning’s gaggle where Scott McClellan got his first crack at dodging and bamboozling about the president’s new policy of presidential leaks not being leaks. We don’t have a ‘below the fold’ feature here at TPM. So I posted it over at TPMmuckraker.com.
Preach, crook! Preach!
From this morning’s Hill e-newsletter: “DeLay said Thursday that announcing his resignation has been liberating. Quoting Martin Luther King. Jr., DeLay said, ‘Free at last, free at last. Thank God Almighty, I’m free at last.'”
It’s not too soon to start calling this for what it is: the Bush administration’s creeping monarchism.
The Times has a piece today on some critical testimony Attorney General Al Gonzales delivered yesterday on Capitol Hill. The president, he suggested, probably does have the authority to conduct warrantless domestic wiretaps.
This comes on the heels of the president’s view, summarized in today’s Post by an unnamed senior administration official, that “Bush sees a distinction between leaks and what he is alleged to have done. The official said Bush authorized the release of the classified information to assure the public of his rationale for war as it was coming under increasing scrutiny.”
We’ve already discussed the fact that the president has the authority to declassify anything, albeit through certain guidelines and procedures he appears not to have followed in this case. The fact that he seems to have done so with the Libby leaks for clearly political and thus inappropriate reasons doesn’t make it illegal in itself. And I think the claim that the president didn’t follow the appropriate procedures in ‘declassifying’ in this case would be too fine a distinction for a court to want to touch. (For an alternative view, see Juliette Kayyem’s discussion of this. She says it may well be illegal.)
Setting all that aside, what is most revealing is the attitude suggested by the White House official rather than just the net outcome. Beyond the legal particulars, the president’s attitude seems to be that the law just doesn’t apply to him — and that’s not surprising since we see so many other instances of that perspective in practice.
Peel back all the individual arguments from Al Gonzales and the president and whomever else they put forward, the underlying idea is not so much that the president is above the law as that he is the law. He embodies it, you might say, even embodies the state itself. And thus what he does can’t be illegal. What he does is simply the state cogitating and defending itself.
This is a vision that simply incompatible with any idea of separation of powers because in this view the president’s prerogative always trumps the other two branches. And that makes it a grave danger to our constitutional system itself.