Much Ado About Nothing, Verse 3000

CNN's David Ensor does the best job I have seen of netting us out on Patrick Fitzgerald's "revelations" last week. Unfortunately, I've seen no one else in the MSM really tackle this in such uncertain terms.

What the most recent document and the one that we're talking about here is the government's response to the defendant, Mr. Libby's request for an effort to get these documents out. And in it -- and I'm going to quote here -- the government says that "the vice president thought" -- Vice President Cheney -- "thought that it was very important for the key judgments of the NIE" -- and that's the National Intelligence Estimate about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction -- "to come out."

"The defendant further testified that he had first advised the vice president that he could not have this conversation with reporter Miller" -- that would be Judy Miller of The New York Times -- "because of the classified nature of the NIE. The defendant testified that the vice president later advised him that the president had authorized the defendant to discuss the relevant portions of the NIE."

So what's involved here, Jim, is that this document from the government says that the vice president informed Mr. Libby that the president himself had authorized Mr. Libby to leak certain information or give out certain information that came out of this document, this National Intelligence Estimate, on what the intelligence community thought Iraq had in the way of weapons of mass destruction.

So, it had nothing to do with Valerie Plame-Wilson's name. It was simply about this matter of intelligence in the lead-up to the war.

And in that matter, the president, according to this document, authorized Mr. Libby to give out some information to Judy Miller.

And by the way, he is legally entitled to do so.

If the president decides to declassify information, he has that legal right. So, it's not about a law being broken here, and it's not about Valerie Plame-Wilson's name. But it does show us the first evidence that the president himself wanted some of this information put out in the media. (...)

And, you know, after all, the -- Ambassador Wilson -- [former] Ambassador [Joseph] Wilson being Valerie Plame-Wilson's husband -- had put out a piece [a July 2003 editorial in The New York Times] in which he said -- in which he attacked the administration for suggesting Iraq was going after uranium in Africa.

The administration wanted to highlight certain parts of this until-then-classified document that suggested that Iraq was aggressively pursuing some aspects of a nuclear weapons program, was looking for ways of getting uranium.

And so, they wanted to have that evidence out there to help their case in the run-up to war. Selective leaking authorized at the highest level, that's -- I'm afraid that is business as usual in Washington. It's been practiced by Republicans and Democrats alike.

Of course, a savvy and capable political operation would have long-since defeated this silliness. Three more years.