Leaking With A Vengeance

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One irony here is that a special counsel might actually help the White House keep the story off the front page. Damaging as they were in the Clinton years, well-managed special counsels have the one advantage of theoretically putting everything under a cone of silence and allowing a President to move on. Some legal experts have noted that special counsels are needed not to open probes but to end them. "DOJ won't be able to make this case," says a former Clinton Justice official, noting the difficulty of leak hunts, "but it also won't be able to close it because nobody will believe them." That's why, notes George Terwilliger, a former deputy attorney general in the first Bush Administration, "in some cases, it's absolutely true that due to personalities and circumstances, the perception of the integrity of the resulting judgment will be enhanced if some outside person ... is brought in."

Just because most experts predict the legal damage to be limited does not mean the political fight will end soon. One of the reasons the fight feels even uglier and more desperate than usual is that it comes at a time when almost every political institution seems tarnished. To the extent that the Bush Administration has to answer for David Kay's failure to find any WMD in Iraq, its answer is that fault lies with the shortcomings of the intelligence community. The spies, for their part, have been quick to remind their allies on Capitol Hill of the White House's and hard-liners' refusal to listen to their footnotes, warnings and caveats last year. And the Democrats, who had forgotten what it was like even to glimpse the political upper hand, seem just a little bit too happy that the WMD hunters have come up empty-handed and the situation in Iraq is becoming an ever greater liability for the President. With the White House, the CIA, Democrats and Republicans so busy covering their tracks, it is no wonder that public confidence in their judgments and motives is shaken when the nation's challenges seem only to be growing. --Reported by Timothy J. Burger, Massimo Calabresi, James Carney, Matthew Cooper, John F. Dickerson, Viveca Novak, Elaine Shannon, Karen Tumulty, Douglas Waller and Michael Weisskopf/Washington