{"id":1083,"date":"2004-01-13T14:35:47","date_gmt":"2004-01-13T19:35:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/archives\/1083.html"},"modified":"2004-01-13T14:35:47","modified_gmt":"2004-01-13T19:35:47","slug":"bush-white-house-goes-after-oneill-for-alleged-leak","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/bush-white-house-goes-after-oneill-for-alleged-leak\/","title":{"rendered":"Bush White House goes after O’Neill for alleged leak"},"content":{"rendered":"

I knew the White House would go after former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill for sharing some of Bush’s embarrassing secrets, but I didn’t expect this<\/a>. I figured they’d call him a disgruntled ex-employee, or maybe a bitter man looking for attention, etc. But to accuse him of criminal activity? C’mon.<\/p>\n

The big news of the day is the Treasury Department’s request for a probe into O’Neill’s alleged misuse of documents that may have been classified. Apparently, at least one of the docs O’Neill gave to Ron Suskind for use in the new book, “The Price of Loyalty<\/a>,” and which was subsequently shown on 60 Minutes<\/a> on Sunday, was considered “secret” by the administration.<\/p>\n

“Based on the ’60 Minutes’ segment aired Sunday evening, there was a document that was shown that appeared to be classified,” said Treasury Department spokesman Rob Nichols. “It was for that reason that it was referred to the U.S. inspector general’s office.”<\/p>\n

This is petty — and transparent — nonsense. Bush, Cheney, and Rove are mad that O’Neill is breaking ranks, so they hope to punish him, and undermine the credibility of his recent comments, by accusing him of leaking sensitive classified information.<\/p>\n

There’s so many things wrong with these sleazy White House tactics, it’s hard to know where to start.
\n
\nFirst, as Josh Marshall noted<\/a>, it’s amusing how quickly the administration is acting in response to an alleged illegal leak this time<\/i>, but not when it involved the identity of an undercover CIA agent.<\/p>\n

Number of days between Novak column outing Valerie Plame and announcement<\/a> of investigation: 74 days.<\/p>\n

Number of days between O’Neill 60 Minutes interview and announcement<\/a> of investigation: 1 day.<\/p>\n

Having the administration reveal itself as a gaggle of hypocritical goons … priceless.<\/i><\/p>\n

Second, it’s awfully convenient of the White House to castigate O’Neill for sharing sensitive documents with a journalist when others in the White House, including Bush, have been doing the same thing for three years.<\/p>\n

For example, the Washington Post noted<\/a> today that the administration shared “notes taken during more than 50 national security council and other meetings,” as well as “other personal notes, memos, calendars, written internal chronologies, transcripts and other documents” with Bob Woodward for his book, “Bush at War.”<\/p>\n

Indeed, Bush personally helped Woodward with the research, often speaking candidly about classified information<\/a>.<\/p>\n

And lastly, the biggest problem with these attacks on O’Neill? The documents he shared with Suskind, unlike Plame’s identity, were neither secret nor classified.<\/p>\n

As Kevin Drum noted<\/a> yesterday, the document in question was released to the public six months ago<\/a> in response to a FOIA request from Judicial Watch<\/a>. As Drum said, “That’s quite a secret, isn’t it?”<\/p>\n

Hoping to defend himself against White House attacks, O’Neill noted on the Today show<\/a> this morning that the same documents used in Suskind’s book are the same docs sent to him on a compact disc by the department’s own general counsel after O’Neill was forced from his job.<\/p>\n

“The truth is I didn’t take any documents at all,” O’Neill said. Suskind “approached me after he heard me give a speech last January wanting to write a book about my ideas. And after I had read the things that he’d written before, I decided to cooperate with him and I called the chief legal officer at the Treasury Department, the general counsel and said to him, ‘I’d like to have the documents that are okay for me to have.’ … Under the law, [the general counsel] is not supposed to send me anything that isn’t unclassified.”<\/p>\n

O’Neill also responded to a Wall Street Journal editorial today, which described the book as O’Neill’s “heavily hyped memoir” and criticized the former secretary of “impugning colleagues and betraying confidences to sell a book.” <\/p>\n

O’Neill emphasized that “The Price of Loyalty” is “Ron Suskind’s book…. This is not my book. I have no economic interest in it, contrary to the inference in the Wall Street Journal this morning. I hope people will read it because I think it makes a contribution to illuminating, especially for young people, what I consider to be a bipartisan, broken political process.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I knew the White House would go after former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill for sharing some of Bush’s embarrassing secrets, but I didn’t expect this. I figured they’d call him a disgruntled ex-employee, or maybe a bitter man looking for attention, etc. But to accuse him of criminal activity? C’mon. The big news of the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1083","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1083","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1083"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1083\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1083"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1083"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1083"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}