Three weeks ago, on the eve of a White House summit involving the Iraqi prime minister, a classified memo by a senior Bush aide was leaked to the press. The memo, penned by national security adviser Stephen Hadley, questioned the willingness and ability of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Al-Maliki to help U.S. interests.
But when a reporter today asked Bush — who’s made no secret of his intolerance for leaks — whether he or his staff had called for an investigation into the leak, the president pleaded ignorance on the subject.
“You know, there may be an ongoing investigation of this, I just don’t know. If there is, if I knew about it, it’s not fresh in my mind…
“And we’ve had a lot of leaks, Mark,” Bush continued, “as you know, some of them out of — I don’t know where they’re from, therefore I’m not gonna speculate.”
The Bush administration has not been shy about going after leaks when it wants to: the New York Times is facing an investigation into who leaked its reporters details of the secret NSA domestic wiretapping program. At the time, Bush denied a personal role in ordering that probe.
Eric Kleefeld
Eric Kleefeld joined TPM as an intern for the final months of the 2006 midterm elections, and then kept showing up for work. His other interests include guitars, old comic books and the politics of various English-speaking countries.
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