Here is how the filing by special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald describes what happened (page
23):



Defendant [Libby] testified that the Vice President later advised him that the President had authorized defendant to disclose the relevant portions of
the NIE [National Intelligence Estimate]. Defendant testified that he also spoke to David Addington, then Counsel to the Vice President, whom defendant considered to be an expert in national security law, and Mr. Addington opined that Presidential authorization to publicly disclose a document amounted to a declassification of the document.



In other words, this was an authorized disclosure of information, the opposite of a leak.

These reports have served as pornography for the Angry Left, which has constructed an elaborate fantasy world around the Plame kerfuffle. In fact, it is nothing more than a battle over procedure.

Libby is seeking to compel the prosecution to turn over certain information to the defense; Fitzgerald is resisting. Among the information Fitzgerald has so far refused to turn over, by the way, are the two facts supposedly at the center of the case: whether Valerie Plame was a covert agent (extensive evidence on the public record comes close to proving that she was not), and who "leaked" Plame's identity to columnist Bob Novak.


More than anything else, the whole kerfuffle is a reflection on the way anti-Bush animus has fed into the adversarial culture of post-Watergate journalism in America. First the New York Times beat the drums for a special prosecutor to investigate who provided accurate information to reporters, albeit supposedly in violation of the law. Among the results: A Times reporter went to jail.


Now we witness the astonishing spectacle of newspapers trying to spin a scandal out of a legal disclosure of information to the press, as if releasing facts means having something to hide.

Maybe we can't expect better from political partisans, but journalists are supposed to stand for the neutral principle of the public's right to know. If they pervert that principle in the pursuit of a partisan program, they will find it harder to assert it when it serves their purposes, whatever those purposes may be.