The President and "Leaks" of Classified Information

There was a lot of hyperventilating reporting yesterday about the fact that Scooter Libby has apparently testified that Vice President Cheney told him that President Bush had authorized him to "leak" classified intelligence estimates to the media to counteract the lies that Joe Wilson was telling about the President, the rationale for the Iraq War, Saddam Hussein's attempts to purchase uranium "yellowcake" in Africa, etc.

The problem with all of this bloviation is a fairly simple conceptual one: Presidents cannot "leak" classified information. The media apparently have the notion that there is some free-floating thing out there called "classified" information, and that this "classified" information has an ontological status somehow apart from the real people in real governmental organizations who did the classifying. But it doesn't. Classified information is simply information that the executive branch -- operating through its foreign policy and intelligence agencies -- deems to be worthy of being classified and hence subject to restrictions on who can be told about it. But the executive branch, again, is simply an organization of the government that under the Constitution has a single chief executive, the President.

So, ultimately, as much as it pains the liberal loonies in the media to hear it, classified information is simply whatever the President says it is. Again, Presidents cannot leak classified information. Period. End of story. If the President says it's not classified, it's not classified.

President Bush had the Constitutional authority to declassify information anytime he wanted, and, in this case, it was particularly important to do so, as, in time of war, Joe Wilson and the useful idiots in the media were publishing lies designed to undermine his conduct of the war and to place America in bad repute internationally. That was the real scandal.