Much as I don’t like to admit it that may be correct. The President apparently has the right to declassify anything, and if he ordered the information released, it was not a crime to release it. So we don’t really know whether or not a crime was committed.
It was certainly a despicable thing to do.
Especially since had he done it and announced it when it became public, we’d have been spared the expense of the investigation etc. But I suspect either:
or
More or less. I think it’s very difficult to convict anyone of this particular crime. It was an objective almost lost from the start, if it was possible at all. I think there are no material issues of facts to resolve, I think the perjury was revealed in a manner that made what really occurred pretty plain, and when all was said and done, nobody was charged with anything directly related to the objective of the original investigation.
That said, as I indicated earlier in this thread, that doesn’t give Libby a pass to lie.
Zakalwe, FWIW, although I don’t believe the posts I originally made that prompted all this were dickish or out of line in any way, the escalation that occurred after them did seem to cross the “being a dick for the hell of it” line, and for that I’m sorry. Call it a character flaw, but where I come from, if someone comes at you hard, you go right back at him. But that’s not a good excuse. I could have made my point without the vitriol (whether or not I received any), and I didn’t. My apologies.
Absolutely granted. In fact, Fitzgerald has said this many times. The difficulty of getting a conviction on outing a covert agent is, sadly, very high.
Admirably said. You have my apology as well. As I noted in my first post in this thread, it was truly a “straw/camel” thing. Your “transgression” (such as it was in my eyes) was certainly far from the most egregious I’ve ever seen, it was just the right one at the right time. Know what I mean?
Boyo, I get that the Pres can disclassify, but post facto? That’s less clear to me.
This was a monumental fuck-up from the word go and it amuses me that this may be the thing that has finally pushed a number of fence sitters to finally recognize that this administration may be the most ethically and morally bereft in history.
The confusion here, I think, is that Bush very specifically came out after the leak and said “we will get to the bottom of this and punish whoever is responsible.” Seems like he could have cut the whole kerfuffle short if he’d said, instead, “Yeah, y’know, actually, it’s not really classified, because I declassified it, so it isn’t really a leak and we’re not going to worry about it.”
Well, that’s not so much confusion to me as a smoking gun that said that he hadn’t declassified. That’s the genesis of my post facto question. To state it very clearly:
Can the President declassify material after it’s already been published?
Not precisely. What he said was "And if there is a leak out of my administration, I want to know who it is. And if the person has violated law, the person will be taken care of. "
And he certainly *has * been taken care of.
That’s not quite what the president said:
‘Punished’ and ‘taken care of’ obviously mean quite different things in Mr. Bush’s vernacular.
Well, the Medal of Freedom hasn’t come yet.
I don’t claim to know whether he declassified it at all, let alone post facto.
But it’s certainly possible he did it before the fact, and simply lied to the press about it because he didn’t want to take the political heat. The president lying to the press is not a crime either.
I think this is fairly unlikely. I think Cheney ordered it, and he’s not big on checking with GW in advance. But it’s all speculation.