From Special Report with Bret Baier | Tuesday, July 24, 2012
On Senator Dianne Feinstein’s backtracking on remarks made Monday in which she implicated the White House in recent intelligence leaks:
I think the Feinstein walk back is not terribly convincing. It’s obviously a hostage tape. You can almost see the hostage takers — well, you can imagine them standing behind her when the statement is issued.
Yesterday, when she talked about the White House being a source of the leak, she didn’t only speculate. She actually said, “And there’s a book they can read and they’ll see it very clearly.” She’s referring to the book by David Sanger [about] Obama’s secret wars, extracts of which were on the front page of the “New York Times,” in which the leaks were either attributed to high administration officials, White House officials, or sometimes quoting the official by name.
This is not Watergate leaks where somebody’s whispering it in the basement of a garage in Virginia. These are leaks obviously leaked by — or statements made by — high administration officials in the White House who were in the Situation Room. Who else is in there, and knows about what happened there? [The leaks] were given proudly to Sanger so he could sing the praises of the courage and audacity and wisdom and seriousness of Obama in dealing with Iran, Stuxnet, etc.
On the possible political effects of the leak scandal:
If it were an isolated incident it would not have any political effect. But it plays into the theme of Obama putting himself and reelection above the country. Clearly if these things were leaked to make him look tough on national defense, help in the reelection, at the expense of what Feinstein herself has said — great damage to American national security — that fits with the Keystone pipeline decision, the decision to withdraw the surge troops in Afghanistan in the middle of the fighting season, now, rather than what the military recommended, after the fighting season, which would be after Election Day. All these other decisions make the president look as if he subordinates the interest of the nation to his own interests.