White House: No Presidential Error

April 7, 2006 — -- A day after it was revealed that President Bush authorized the release of sensitive pre-war intelligence, his spokesman did not deny the information was leaked by the White House.

But spokesman Scott McClellan said it had been declassified and was made public as a defense against allegations the intelligence was manipulated.

Refusing to answer many questions by citing the ongoing legal investigation into the matter, McClellan faced a barrage of queries from reporters about the timing of the release of the information and said it was not wrong to do because it had been declassified by the president.

"The president would never authorize the disclosure of information that he felt could compromise our nation's security," McClellan said.

Refusing to recognize the difference, he said, is "crass politics" on the part of Democrats, and he denied that the release was politically motivated.

McClellan said the information from the National Intelligence Estimate was "historical" and the public needed to know the contents as the administration faced claims it had misused the data in the run-up to the Iraq war.

Political questions swirl around the recent grand jury testimony by a former vice-presidential aide that Bush authorized the release of sensitive intelligence gathered before the war in Iraq. But a senior administration official insisted to ABC News such a move would not violate the law.

"By definition, the president cannot leak," the official said. "He has the inherent authority to declassify something. ...It's like accusing a shopkeeper of shoplifting from himself."

In sworn grand jury testimony released today, Vice President Cheney's former chief of staff Lewis "Scooter" Libby said he received "approval from the president through the vice president" to leak parts of the highly classified NIE to New York Times reporter Judith Miller.

A senior White House official would not comment on whether the president authorized the disclosure of parts of the NIE but said that during the time Libby describes -- mid-2003, when former Ambassador Joe Wilson was claiming the president had twisted intelligence about Iraq's nuclear weapons program to lead the nation to war -- the Bush administration was in the midst of a fervent defense of the war.