White House leaks draw ire of lawmakers' group

[WestVirginiaRebel]

Politico:

Democrats and Republicans on Capitol Hill don’t agree on much these days, but they agree that the Obama administration has a serious problem with leaking classified information.

And with national security in the balance, a group of congressional leaders say there’s an urgent need to get things back in line.

“A special prosecutor can take years. We don’t have years. We need to legislate and we need to do things quickly,” said Senate Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) Thursday at a press conference of chairs and ranking members of the House and Senate intelligence committees.

The four legislators — Feinstein, Sen. Saxby Chambless (R-Ga.) and Reps. Mike Rogers (R-Mich) and Dutch Ruppersberger (D-Md.) — said they met Thursday morning with James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, and will receive a briefing from FBI Director Robert Mueller later in the day.

But after a glut of stories about secret U.S. operations overseas – from an Associated Press reports of foiled Yemeni bomb plots to drone strikes in Pakistan to last week’s New York Times story confirming long-suspected U.S. involvement in development of the computer virus Stuxnet – they say it’s become clear that there’s a problem that the administration hasn’t been able to address on its own.

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The Big Mouth Presidency...

[SrWoodchuck]

Secretary Gates’s STFU Policy

 

http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2012/06/secretary-gatess-stfu-policy/

 

“At the Pentagon, top officers fumed at Brennan’s blow-by-blow description of how the SEALs operated; they believed that the former CIA officer had given away operational secrets never shared outside the tribe. (In fact, it appears no real secrets were divulged.) No one was angrier than Mullen himself, who still fumed about that news conference nearly a year later…

“By Wednesday of that week, Gates went to see Donilon, offering up a barbed assessment of how the White House had handled the aftermath of the raid.

 

“‘I have a new strategic communications approach to recommend,’ Gates said in his trademark droll tones, according to an account later provided by his colleagues.

 

“What was that, Donilon asked?

 

“‘Shut the f@*k up,’ the defense secretary said.”

 

-Jake Tapper