Judging the Damage From Obama's Leaks

[Geee]

American Spectator:

The flood of classified information coming out of the Obama White House has grown so large -- and the leaks so important -- that last week there was a bipartisan call for an investigation into the White House's apparent involvement. If it leads to the right kind of investigation, it may be enough to reverse the leaks' intended political effect of boosting the president's chances of reelection.

Last Thursday's call for an investigation into the leaks, made by both chairmen and ranking members of the Senate and House Permanent Select Committees on Intelligence, was unprecedented. It must have resulted from the four members' judgment that the leaks have seriously damaged our national security and the ability of our intelligence community to do its job.

The Intelligence Committee leaders' action raised the political heat on the president to such a degree that Attorney General Eric Holder appointed two U.S. attorneys, one from Maryland and one from Washington , D.C., to oversee special investigations by the FBI that were already under way.

But these investigations will drag on and their results won't be known for years. Calls for congressional hearings at which possible leakers and senior White House figures would be called to account continue, but any open hearings would fail over claims that classified information couldn't be disclosed. Questions that demanded details of the administration's internal debates would be blocked by claims of executive privilege. Some pundits, undeterred by history, have called for a revival of the "independent counsel" process of unfond memory.

There is a better process that would produce results sooner than November, and could -- if seized upon by Gov. Romney as leader of the Republican Party -- have the right kind of political effect before the election.

The focus of the leak problem should not only be the questions of who leaked the information and what role the president played in the disclosures. The focus has to be the assessment of how much damage -- and what kinds of damage --the leaks did to our national security.

Every leaker has an agenda. More often than not, and quite evidently in these cases, the agenda is a political one. But for the Republicans to have any impact on the campaign -- and the desired effect of ending the leak campaign -- they have to begin with substance, not politics.