Specter Calls for Bush to Speak on Leak
The Republican senator said of Bush's authorization of the WMD intelligence leak: "We ought to get to the bottom of it so it can be evaluated, again, by the American people." Also: Information had been strongly disputed months before Cheney and Libby leaked it.of Bush’s authorization of the WMD intelligence leak: “We ought to get to the bottom of it so it can be evaluated, again, by the American people.”
Also: Information had been strongly disputed months before Cheney and Libby leaked it.
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Specter Calls for Bush to Speak on Leak
WASHINGTON — President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney should speak publicly about their involvement in the CIA leak case so people can understand what happened, a leading Republican senator said Sunday.
”We ought to get to the bottom of it so it can be evaluated, again, by the American people,” said Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee.
In a federal court filing last week, the prosecutor in the case said Cheney’s former chief of staff, I. Lewis Libby, testified before a grand jury that he was authorized by Bush, through Cheney, to leak information from a classified document that detailed intelligence agencies’ conclusions about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
A lawyer knowledgeable about the case said Saturday that Bush declassified sensitive intelligence in 2003 and authorized its public disclosure to rebut Iraq war critics, but he did not specifically direct that Libby be the one to disseminate the information.
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The veteran politician was first elected to the U.S. Senate to represent Pennsylvania in 1980. He spent 30 years in the upper house, making him the longest-serving senator in the state's history.
The 111th Congress produced some real eleventh-hour gains for the Obama administration, and by extension the president's party, but some Democrats, such as Sen. Harry Reid and outgoing Sen. Arlen Specter, aren't ready to get over some of the biggest partisan clashes of the last two years.
By day's end Wednesday, our chums over at the U.S. Senate hadn't moved much closer to the finish line in dealing with the financial regulation bill, to the chagrin of some senators and, no doubt, the satisfaction of others.
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