I am happy to defend the rule of law.
If the law has been broken then let the accused face trial. As I said, if Libby is convicted then he should rightly be punished. If Bush or Cheney broke the law then they too should be prosecuted. In this case the prosecutor and his team have looked into this case for 2 years and were unable to come up with a single indictment regarding the release of classified information. Guess what, there's no crime there.

>You have been quite clear on what you are willing to defend.
>
>>>>>Is a President, on the eve of his reelection campaign, legally entitled to ward off political embarrassment and conceal past failures in the exercise of his office by unilaterally and informally declassifying selected — as well as false and misleading — portions of a classified National Intelligence Estimate that he has previously refused to declassify, in order to cause such information to be secretly disclosed under false pretenses in the name of a "former Hill staffer" to a single reporter, intending that reporter to publish such false and misleading information in a prominent national newspaper?"
>>>>>
>>>>>Defending that position reveals a lot about a person.
>>>>
>>>>I do not need to defend that.
>>>
>>>You have been defending that.
>>
>>Am I not being clear? As far as I know there are no limits on Presidential authority to declassify information. If there are no limits then the circumstances are irrelevent. Therefore the answer remains yes.
>>
>>Again, if there are legal limits that I am not aware which address Alterman's points then please present them.