Libby Testified That Bush Authorized Leak

News:
According to court papers filed earlier this week by special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby’s testimony before a federal grand jury implicates not only his former boss Vice President Dick Cheney in the CIA leak case, but President Bush as well. Libby stated that the authorization to discuss with journalists portions of the government’s highly-classified National Intelligence Estimate came “from the President through the Vice President”, those discussions ultimately leading to the outing of covert CIA operative Valerie Plame. The authorization came down only days after Plame's husband, former ambassador Joseph Wilson, published an op-ed piece questioning one the administration’s key rationales for invading Iraq. Libby apparently resisted Cheney’s order to leak the information at first, but relented when assured by the Vice President that Bush himself had called for the move. Libby also testified that White House lawyers told him that, in authorizing the disclosure of classified material, President Bush had effectively declassified it—a decision that many legal experts feel the president isn’t empowered to make autonomously. The White House had no immediate comment on the filing, but it’s looking less and less likely that the president will follow through on his public vow to fire anyone in his administration involved in the leaking of classified information. The papers filed by Fitzgerald also reveal that Libby begged White House spokesman Scott McClellan to issue a statement exonerating him, even going so far as to offer a handwritten draft of how it might read; McClellan's resulting statement has since been thrown back in his face time and again as demonstrably untrue.