Say Anything Blog

Bush made these comments earlier today, but I just caught them in the transcript over at the White House website:

Now, you know what’s interesting about the NIE—it was a intelligence report done last April. As I understand, the conclusions—the evidence on the conclusions reached was stopped being gathered on February—at the end of February. And here we are, coming down the stretch in an election campaign, and it’s on the front page of your newspapers. Isn’t that interesting? Somebody has taken it upon themselves to leak classified information for political purposes.

I talked to John Negroponte today, the DNI. You know, I think it’s a bad habit for our government to declassify every time there’s a leak, because it means that it’s going to be hard to get good product out of our analysts. Those of you who have been around here long enough know what I’m talking about. But once again, there’s a leak out of our government, coming right down the stretch in this campaign,—to create confusion in the minds of the American people, in my judgment, is why they leaked it.

Video here.

I think the President nailed it.  Look at how the leaked report was first reported on by the media, and then look at what it turned out to be.  The President said that someone leaked this memo to the media in order to confuse the American people, and he is absolutely correct.  It was a political hit all along, just as I said.

First some of the President’s enemies in the intelligence community leak the memo to the media, then the media hypes only the parts of the memo that could be construed as critical of his policies and then the Democrats jump on board to harvest a bunch of political.

It reminds me of the 2004 election when the forged CBS memos came out in September.  This time the memos in question were real, just illegally leaked to the media who in turn chose to selectively report the contents.