Forum Post: Are ObamaLeaks an impeachable offense?
Posted 11 years ago on Feb. 5, 2013, 2:23 p.m. EST by chuckuschumer
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From Marc Thiessen, The Washington Post:
Imagine if The Post broke a story about the biggest scandal of the Obama-era — and Washington responded with a collective yawn?
That’s precisely what happened recently when The Post reported on its front page that senior Obama administration officials were being investigated by the FBI and Justice Department for the leak last summer that the president had personally ordered cyberattacks on the Iranian nuclear program using a computer virus developed with Israel called Stuxnet.
The Post quotes a source who says that FBI agents and prosecutors are pursuing “everybody — at pretty high levels.” The paper further reports that investigators “have conducted extensive analysis of the e-mail accounts and phone records of current and former government officials” and that some have been confronted “with evidence of contact with journalists.”
This is big. And former senior government lawyers I spoke with recently explained why it could get a whole lot bigger:
The leaks clearly came from someone in the president’s inner circle.
As The Post explains, “Knowledge of the virus was likely to have been highly compartmentalized and limited to a small set of Americans and Israelis.” Moreover, whoever leaked the information was present when the president discussed this covert action program in the Situation Room. There is a tiny universe of individuals who could have shared the details of President Obama’s personal deliberations on the covert program with the press.
If the president authorized the disclosure of national security secrets that exposed a covert action and undermined a U.S. ally in an effort to gain a political advantage in his reelection campaign, that would be a scandal of gigantic proportions. As one former top Justice Department official told me “if done for political gain, rather than for a bona fide purpose advancing the public interests of the United States, it could be grounds for impeachment.”
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