Plamegate and the impeachment of George W. Bush

As you no doubt know, Scooter has testified that Bush and Cheney authorized the leaking of a classified Iraq report -- the 2002 National Intelligence Estimate -- to NYT reporter Judy Miller. Upon hearing this news, my first reaction was "That's all she wrote." If, when, Democrats regain some congressional muscle, we now have bulletproof grounds for impeachment.

Then the Bush administration claimed possession of an all-purpose get-out-of-jail free card: The president can declassify anything he wants for any reason he wants. Presumably, this new rule also justifies the outing of Valerie Plame/Wilson for purposes of revenge.

Of course, any president would pay a huge political price if discovered doing such a thing. But W's poll numbers are already rather wretched. This isn't about political capital; this is about keeping the job and staying out of the Big House.

The right-wingers would howl like Larry Talbot on a bad night if Clinton tried a trick like this. But they will stand by Dubya no matter what he does. After all, Dubya is right with Jesus.

Fortunately, that base of religious zealots is shrinking. The rest of us are left with some important questions:

1. Is the President allowed to declassify an NIE report without signing any sort of a finding? In other words, is leaking information to a "team player" journalist for political purposes the same as a formal declassification? That's the question Joshua Marshall asks here.

2. Libby said that the info was leaked to Judy on July 8, 2003. Oddly enough, Judith Miller revealed the contents of that same NIE estimate -- then just a work-in-progress -- way back on September 8, 2002. At that time, no-one in Congress had seen this material. Miller's source: "A senior administration official." What the hell was going on?

3. If the president declassified the 2002 NIE estimate in 2003, then why was it still classified in 2004?

Washington D.C., 9 July 2004 - The CIA has decided to keep almost entirely secret the controversial October 2002 CIA intelligence estimate about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction that is the subject of today's Senate Intelligence Committee report, according to the CIA's June 1, 2004 response to a Freedom of Information Act request from the National Security Archive.

The CIA's response included a copy of the estimate, NIE 2002-16HC, October 2002, Iraq's Continuing Programs for Weapons of Mass Destruction, consisting almost entirely of whited-out pages. Only 14 of the 93 pages provided actually contained text, and all of the text except for the two title pages and the two pages listing National Intelligence Council members had previously been released in July 2003. At that time, CIA responded to the first round of controversy over the Niger yellowcake story by declassifying the "Key Findings" section of the estimate and a few additional paragraphs.

The CIA's censorship of the estimate mirrors its apparent treatment of the Senate's own report. The Senate Intelligence Committee had previously noted, in a 17 June 2004 press release, that "The Committee is extremely disappointed by the CIA's excessive redactions to the report."

So. Judy "Aspen roots" Miller is allowed to see classified material denied to the Senate Intelligence Committee. Is that legal?

4. Am I correct in my presumption that the same Nixonian defense ("If the president does it, it's cool") can be applied to the outing of Plame? Remember, Bush said that he would fire anyone involved with the leak. If he authorized the leak, he would have to fire himself.

5. Most importantly, will Fitz be able to get Cheney and Bush for obstruction of justice?

On June 24, 2004, Patrick Fitzgerald entered the Oval Office and asked President George W. Bush (and his lawyer) a few questions about Plamegate. W was not under oath; even so, lying to a prosecutor about so important a matter certainly qualifies as an impeachable offense.

Did the NIE matter come up during that dialogue? As we shall see, a part of that document was leaked because certain parties within the administration felt that it worked against Wilson.

6. How can we hold Bush accountable for his statements to the press? If we apply the new rule ("The prez can do whatever he likes! Neener neener neener!") to the outing of Plame, then quite a few of his public statements stand exposed as impudent lies:

"I don't know if we're going to find out the senior administration official. Now, this is a large administration, and there's a lot of senior officials. I don't have any idea. I'd like to. I want to know the truth. That's why I've instructed this staff of mine to cooperate fully with the investigators -- full disclosure, everything we know the investigators will find out." (From 2003.)

"It's best people wait until the investigation is complete before you jump to conclusions. I don't know all the facts. I want to know all the facts."

That last quote (which is less than a year old) conjures up an amusing image: "Well, now we have the facts. I did it! Wow. That sure is good to know..."

7. Can we straighten out just what was in that NIE estimate? Over on the Left Coaster, eriposte points out some of the oddities. Libby supposedly leaked the estimate because it was "pretty definitive" against Wilson's claims. Fitzgerald's filing reads thus:

As to the meeting on July 8, defendant [Scooter] testified that he was specifically authorized in advance of the meeting to disclose the key judgments of the classified NIE to Miller on that occasion because it was thought that the NIE was “pretty definitive” against what Ambassador Wilson had said and that the Vice President thought that it was “very important” for the key judgments of the NIE to come out...

Defendant testified that he thought he brought a brief abstract of the NIE’s key judgments to the meeting with Miller on July 8. Defendant understood that he was to tell Miller, among other things, that a key judgment of the NIE held that Iraq was “vigorously trying to procure” uranium.

To which eriposte adds:

Why is this so weird?

Well, because the key judgements of the NIE made no mention of the uranium from Africa claim at all! It was specifically agreed to at the IC coordination meeting on the NIE that the uranium claim should NOT be in the Key Judgments. So, releasing the Key Judgments would have actually made Wilson's case appear stronger!

It maketh no sense.

But one thing is clear: The NIE estimate was leaked -- apparently with presidential authorization -- as part of the "get Wilson" campaign. Which makes it all the more difficult to escape the presumption that W also authorized, or at least knew about, the leaking of Plame's identity.

Which brings us right back to question 5 above. That's the one about obstruction of justice.

Looks to me like we are very, very close to a "Got 'im!" moment.

The final question is thus a matter of political judgment. Do Democrats run on the issue of impeachment in 2006?