Last week I speculated as to which member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI) might have been the source of a leak of classified information that, as first reported by the Washington Times, the CIA has now referred to the Department of Justice for further investigation. The leak resulted in a New York Times story that made public the classified details of a CIA program to assassinate al Qaeda leaders and landed the head of the military contractor formerly known as Blackwater on an al Qaeda hit list. The leak came after Leon Panetta revealed the details of the program in classified testimony before HPSCI. Then Democrats on that committee released a letter asking why they had not been briefed on this highly-classified program before. That letter served as chum in the water for the DC press corps sharks to then ferret out the details of the program. The revelation also came at a time when Democrats were under increasing pressure to substantiate allegations by Nancy Pelosi that the CIA had not kept Congress informed of the details of the Bush administration’s enhanced interrogation program. Panetta’s testimony did help demonstrate the pattern of behavior Democrats were alleging, even if it didn’t offer any evidence to support the particular charge from Pelosi that the CIA had lied to Congress about the interrogation program. Democrats had everything to gain from leaking Panetta’s testimony. Republicans had no reason to do so. The leaker is almost certainly a Democrat on that committee. So when you look at the membership of that committee, two names jump out: Reps. Schakowsky and Holt. Schakowsky has waged her own private war against Blackwater for years now, and Holt has called for a Church Committee-style investigation of the CIA’s conduct in the war on terror. Both are rigid left-wing ideologues who concern themselves more with scoring political points than scoring victories in the war on terror. But Rep. Holt was apparently indignant that anyone would suspect him as the source of this leak, which the CIA considers so serious a threat to national security that it has requested a full investigation from DoJ. This morning, his press secretary emailed THE WEEKLY STANDARD:
Yes, we never bothered to ask Rep. Holt whether he’d violated the law and his oath of office. We’ll leave that to the Department of Justice and their polygraph machines. But it is worth pointing out that when the shoe was on the other foot, when it was Republicans who revealed the name of a CIA agent, Valerie Plame, setting off an investigation into the identity of the leaker, Rush Holt was hardly above speculating on the source of the leaks. He pointed the finger at Karl Rove in a column on the left-wing website Talking Points Memo (it was Richard Armitage who was ultimately revealed as the culprit). It’s unclear whether Holt called and asked Rove if he had broken any laws, but it seems obvious that he wouldn’t have been satisfied with a simple denial — he announced in the same column that he was reintroducing a series of Resolutions of Inquiry. As for Rep. Schakowsky, she hasn’t yet confirmed or denied a role in the leak.
