Murray Waas:

Vice President Dick Cheney’s former chief of staff has testified that President Bush authorized him to disclose the contents of a highly classified intelligence assessment to the media to defend the Bush administration’s decision to go to war with Iraq, according to papers filed in federal court on Wednesday by Patrick J. Fitzgerald, the special prosecutor in the CIA leak case.

Here’s the document itself. Below is, I think, the critical part, which is from pages 19-21. I’ll start with the paragraph before to provide a bit of context. Fitzgerald is explaining why Libby doesn’t need all the classified files he says he needs in order to defend himself.

At some point after the publication of the July 6, 2003 Op Ed by Mr. Wilson, Vice President Cheney, defendant’s immediate superior, expressed concerns to defendant regarding whether Mr. Wilson’s trip was legitimate or whether it was in effect a junket set up by Mr. Wilson’s wife. And, in considering “context,” there was press reporting that the Vice President had dispatched Mr. Wilson on the trip (which in fact was not accurate). Disclosing the belief that Mr. Wilson’s wife sent him on the Niger trip was one way for defendant to contradict the assertion that the Vice President had done so, while at the same time undercutting Mr. Wilson’s credibility if Mr. Wilson were perceived to have received the assignment on account of nepotism. The context for defendant’s disclosures in the course of defending the Office of the Vice President will not be fleshed out in any files of CIA or State Department or NSC employees that might reflect what they thought. Put slightly differently, the thoughts and impressions of CIA, State Department, and NSC employees, absent any evidence that these thoughts and impressions were conveyed to defendant, simply cannot shed light on defendant’s state of mind at the time of his alleged criminal conduct. See United States v. Secord, 726 F.Supp. 845, 848-49 (D.D.C. 1989) (“The subjective state of mind which Defendant Secord wishes to prove could have arisen solely from conversations in which he participated, correspondence which he himself read, meetings which he himself attended. . . . The point is simply that Defendant’s state of mind can come only from what he hears or sees. Defendant is entitled to discover materials which evidence his personal knowledge about or belief in the legality of the Enterprise.”).

Nor would such documents of the CIA, NSC and the State Department place in context the importance of the conversations in which defendant participated. Defendant’s participation in a critical conversation with Judith Miller on July 8 (discussed further below) occurred only after the Vice President advised defendant that the President specifically had authorized defendant to disclose certain information in the NIE. Defendant testified that the circumstances of his conversation with reporter Miller – getting approval from the President through the Vice President to discuss material that would be classified but for that approval – were unique in his recollection. Defendant further testified that on July 12, 2003, he was specifically directed by the Vice President to speak to the press in place of Cathie Martin (then the communications person for the Vice President) regarding the NIE and Wilson. Defendant was instructed to provide what was for him an extremely rare “on the record” statement, and to provide “background” and “deep background” statements, and to provide information contained in a document defendant understood to be the cable authored by Mr. Wilson. During the conversations that followed on July 12, defendant discussed Ms. Wilson’s employment with both Matthew Cooper (for the first time) and Judith Miller (for the third time). Even if someone else in some other agency thought that the controversy about Mr. Wilson and/or his wife was a trifle, that person’s state of mind would be irrelevant to the importance and focus defendant placed on the matter and the importance he attached to the surrounding conversations he was directed to engage in by the Vice President.

Likewise, documents from other agencies that defendant never saw will not provide context for defendant’s grand jury testimony regarding these events. Defendant testified that he did not discuss the CIA employment of Ambassador Wilson’s wife with reporter Judith Miller on July 8, 2003 and that he could not have done so because he had forgotten by that time that he had learned about Ms. Wilson’s CIA employment a month earlier from the Vice President. Nor could such documents explain defendant’s testimony disclaiming having discussed Ms. Wilson’s employment with various other government officials prior to July 10, 2003, or his testimony that he was “taken aback” when journalist Tim Russert asked about Ms. Wilson’s employment with the CIA on July 12, 2003. Accordingly, none of the documents requested by defendant could possibly support the defense that the specific perjury specifications are mere “snippets” of conversation he “may have misremembered.”

Eriposte noticed some oddities on page 23.

[Update: Paul Kiel finds something significant on page 24; see also Josh Marshall.]

This doesn’t mean Bush was in on Plamegate from the beginning, however, and the document doesn’t say that Bush’s authorization was specifically about Joe Wilson. Fitz writes on p. 27:

During this time, while the President was unaware of the role that the Vice President’s Chief of Staff and National Security Adviser had in fact played in disclosing Ms. Wilson’s CIA employment, defendant implored White House officials to have a public statement issued exonerating him.

The righties will make much of that sentence, but they will miss the point. As Waas explained, the President authorized disclosure of sensitive ingelligence to defend his decision to go to war in Iraq. It wouldn’t’ surprise me if Bush were kept out of the loop of the Plame-Wilson smear — it’s the old “plausible deniability” game — but the charge is that Bush authorized release of sensitive intelligence for purely political purposes. I assume this is not illegal — the President can disclose anything he wants [Update: See Josh Marshall on this point.] — but it’s still sleazy.

Waas:

One former senior official said: “They [the leakers] might have tipped people to our eavesdropping capacities, and other serious sources and methods issues. But to what end? The information was never presented to the public because it was bunk in the first place.”

These are the same people who won’t submit to FISA oversight because this might magically permit “the enemy” to know how the NSA conducts its data mining, or whatever it’s doing.

See also: Bob Schieffer rips the White House