Sens. John McCain and Saxby Chaimbliss are calling for a Senate probe into whether White House officials leaked details of the cyber warfare program against Iran to the media for political gain. But Senate Democrats are also furious about the leaks, according to The Hill:
Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), chairwoman of the Intelligence Committee, said the leak about the attack on Iran’s nuclear program could “to some extent” provide justification for copycat attacks against the United States.
“This is like an avalanche. It is very detrimental and, candidly, I found it very concerning,” Feinstein said. “There’s no question that this kind of thing hurts our country.”
“A number of those leaks, and others in the last months about drone activities and other activities, are frankly all against national-security interests,” said Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.), chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee. “I think they’re dangerous, damaging, and whoever is doing that is not acting in the interest of the United States of America.”
Both Kerry and Feinstein rejected the idea the leaks were politically motivated, but all signs point to White House authorization for the recent New York Times pieces on cyber warfare and drone strikes. This administration has not been shy when it comes to prosecuting leaks in the past, and yet it’s been notably nonchalant about a breach of this scale.
For example, the author of the Times’s cyber warfare story, David Sanger, told Gawker that “No government agency formally requested that I not publish the story.” The White House obviously knew about the article, and could have asked the Times to hold off if it believed the story was dangerous — but declined to do so. Why? And why call an FBI investigation well after the fact?
What we don’t know is whether the leak originated from the White House in the first place, or whether administration officials simply added additional information to a story that was already being written with help from other government sources or even Israeli officials.
We also don’t know what the White House’s motivation could have been for working with Sanger. Maybe officials talked to him because he agreed to withhold information that was even more sensitive from the final story, or because they wanted to make sure the article did as little damage as possible. But because this is the second big White House leak this spring that plays into the Obama campaign narrative, McCain and Chaimbliss are right to be suspicious.
And to take a very different angle on this news, it is remarkable that Leftists like Kerry and Feinstein are bothering to say anything at all. This is *not* the Dem playbook. Dems do not give any kind of press or publicity to anything that another Dem might be criticized for (to say nothing of actually criticizing another Dem publicly). Unlike Pubs, Dems are pretty good at party discipline. They keep things in the family, so to speak. So to hear two, prominent Dems make public remarks about leaks that can only have come from either the White House itself or the Administration is unusual to say the least. Add to this the remarks by Bill Clinton that have flatly contradicted Obama campaign themes and there is something going on here. n nCould Dems be sensing a Jimmy Carter-Bama in the making and 1980 tsunami building? Might they be carefully and cleverly re-positioning themselves to ingratiate themselves with the Clinton Machine again, sensing that Obama is going down and Hillary is on the rise?
Part of their concern is likely patriotic. The rest is ex-post facto posturing. It lets them look like statesmen without actually having to be them.
I've heard, including from Senator Rubio in an interview, that the Senate Foreign Intelligence Committee works extremely well together with very few partisan divides, so much so that if you were in the room and didn't know the people's names and faces, you would have a very hard time determining who is from which party.
Ms. Goodman raises a very interesting twist on all of this — White House spin to control an article that would come out regardless because the initial source was Israeli — and that if it didn't appear in the US press, it would appear in the Israeli press and make it over here from there. n nThis raises lots of interesting questions. And I will go one beyond even Ms. Goodman here — the White House desperately attempting to PRECLUDE Israel sourcing a story? Obama realizing that when the physical survival of the State of Israel is at risk (which it inherently is with Iranian nukes) that the left-leaning American Jews will vote on the basis of Israel and not just for who the Dem is? n nAnd if Bibi N is a personal friend of Romney, which he apparently is, then things get even more interesting — are these leaks desperate attempts at distraction?