Sen. Dianne Feinstein poured gasoline yesterday on a smoldering fight over national-security leaks from high-level Obama administration officials.
“I think the White House has to understand that some of this is coming from their ranks,” said the California Democrat, who chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee.
She was referring to stories leaked (most to friendly reporters at The New York Times) that burnished Obama’s security CV but risked the lives of American field agents and harmed relations with US allies.
The leaks included Obama’s oversight of a “kill list” of terrorist targets for drone strikes; operational secrets of the SEAL raid that killed Osama bin Laden; the work of double agents in stopping an al Qaeda airline bomb plot in Yemen, and the US role in creating the Stuxnet virus that slowed Iran’s nuclear program.
They came in a torrent; back in June, Feinstein said she’d “never seen it worse” in her 11 years on the intel committee.
It’s an open secret that Team Obama was behind much of the leaks — thus Feinstein’s statement. But that directly contradicts what President Obama claims.
“The notion that the White House would purposely release classified national-security information is offensive,” he said last month.
Offensive, for sure. Also true.
And it’s a signal of just how damning Feinstein’s assessment was that yesterday she basically apologized to Obama — after Mitt Romney used her words against the president — and said she “shouldn’t have speculated” about the source of the leaks.
Well, we’ll “speculate” that Feinstein has some pretty reliable sources. And whatever she’s been coached to say by campaign officials, her concern over the leaks is apparent — and appropriate.
Her voice has helped force the administration to open up multiple inquiries into the sources of the leaks. She deserves credit, even if she doesn’t want any.
Which left the ball in the hands of Romney, who yesterday delivered an acid-tipped foreign-policy speech.
“Exactly who in the White House betrayed these secrets?” he asked. “Did a superior authorize it? These are things that Americans are entitled to know — and they are entitled to know it now.
“If the president believes, as he said last week, that the buck stops with him, then he owes all Americans a full and prompt accounting of the facts.”
Correct, but unlikely.