Howard Dean, the Democratic Party chairman, said on Sunday that US Vice President Dick Cheney would need to resign if he had ordered a leak that resulted in the public exposure of an undercover CIA officer.
Dean cited news reports last week that Lewis Libby, Cheney's former chief of staff, had testified to a grand jury that his "superiors," whom he did not name, had told him to leak classified information to reporters to justify the Iraq war.
But Libby's testimony, according to the document that was the basis of the news reports, did not say anyone had told him to disclose the name of Valerie Wilson, the undercover operative, as Dean appeared to suggest. The testimony dealt with a different but related disclosure of classified information from a report about Iraq's nuclear capability.
In an interview on the CBS News program Face the Nation, Dean appeared to expand on the news reports about Libby's testimony, saying grand jury testimony showed that "it turns out that the vice president of the United States may have been responsible for those leaks" about Wilson's role with the CIA for political reasons.
Any confusion on Dean's part about last week's disclosure underlines both the deep complexity of the investigation into who leaked Wilson's identity to the press and its potential for enormous political opportunities and pitfalls.
There are two reasons the confusion is likely to continue as a criminal case against Libby goes forward. The first is that Libby is not charged with improperly disclosing Wilson's identity in the summer of 2003; rather, he is charged with lying to investigators about how he learned of her position at the agency and her role in it assigning her husband, Joseph Wilson IV, to go to Africa to determine if Iraq was trying to acquire nuclear materials.
Joseph Wilson accused the administration of twisting intelligence about Iraq's nuclear capabilities, and days later, his wife's cover was blown in a column by Robert Novak in July 2003.
Joseph Wilson has asserted that his wife's identity was exposed in retaliation for his public criticism.
The second troublesome dimension is that the issue deals with the unacknowledged but frequent practice of government officials selectively leaking classified information to journalists. Although such leaks are forbidden by law, there is widespread recognition that it is done.
The document disclosed last Thursday, a prosecutor's letter to Libby's lawyers, shows that Libby had told the grand jury he was engaging in just such a practice.
The document said he told the grand jury that his superiors had authorized him to share with reporters information from a National Intelligence Estimate in June and July 2003. The intelligence estimate, a classified report about Iraq's nuclear capability, was used to rebut growing public concern about the rationale for invading Iraq.
The letter from the prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald, was disclosed in a filing by Libby's lawyers.
Fitzgerald said in the letter that he was going to use the testimony to show that Libby was directly engaged in the Bush administration effort to discredit its critics by conferring with reporters.
The letter said Libby testified that he spoke with reporters about the "NIE," as the intelligence estimate is called.
"We also note that it is our understanding that Mr. Libby testified that he was authorized to disclose information about the NIE to the press by his superiors," Fitzgerald said.
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