Scooter Blames His Boss

Murray Waas drags Plamegate back into the headlines (or, at least, the blogs ) with his piece on Scooter Libby's grand jury testimony . It's a rare case of the buck being passed furtherupthe chain-of-command, if also an example of fairly common ass-covering:

Vice President Dick Cheney's former chief of staff, I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby, testified to a federal grand jury that he had been "authorized" by Cheney and other White House "superiors" in the summer of 2003 to disclose classified information to journalists to defend the Bush administration's use of prewar intelligence in making the case to go to war with Iraq, according to attorneys familiar with the matter, and to court records.

We hope this will be the season of indicted underlings blaming bosses, which is always so much more fun than the usual way of going about things. Scooter only goes as far as to say they told him to share the National Intelligence Estimate that he and Judy Miller bonded over at their oh-so-hard-to-precisely-recall candlelit dinner, but if a little bit of trivia about a covert CIA operative spilled out, well, Scooter's hardly to blame -- he was specifically told by the grownups that hewouldn't get in trouble!

 Cheney 'Authorized' Libby To Leak Classified Information [National Journal]