A number of CQ readers pointed out a report last night in the Los Angeles Times that indicates that the House Intelligence Committee may have found the New York Times' source for their national-security scoops. An unnamed Democratic staffer to the commitee has been suspended pending an investigation:

House Intelligence Chairman Peter Hoekstra has suspended a Democratic staff member because of concerns he may have leaked a high-level intelligence assessment to The New York Times last month.

In a letter obtained by The Associated Press Thursday night, Rep. Ray LaHood, R-Ill., a committee member, said that an unidentified staffer requested the document from National Intelligence Director John Negroponte three days before the Sept. 23 story about its conclusions.

The staffer received the National Intelligence Estimate on global terror trends on Sept. 21.

"I have no credible information to say any classified information was leaked from the committee's minority staff, but the implications of such would be dramatic," LaHood wrote Hoekstra, R-Mich., late last month. "This may, in fact, be only coincidence, and simply 'look bad.' But coincidence, in this town, is rare."

It's not just rare, it's almost non-existent. The NIE was the latest in a series of intelligence leaks that found their way onto the front pages of the NYT. It started last December with the revelation of the warrantless surveillance on international communications, and came up again in the spring with the Swift program exposure. The Department of Justice had pledged to investigate the leaks, but at this time it looks as if Congress may have solved the mystery.

With the election pending, the temptation would be to look at this as an electoral issue, but it's not going to have that kind of impact. Leaks do not generally come from one party or the other; they do usually have political motivations, though, and it's always been more likely to have been a Democrat than a Republican for a number of reasons. Democrats have been shut out of the oversight process and would be more likely to lash out in this manner. Their opposition to the programs, at least after their exposure, also provides another motive. However, I doubt that people will consider the staffers when it comes time to vote for their representatives.

If this turns out to be true, the staffer should face several years in prison. After all, the Congressional committees have to protect national-security information, and the American people have to trust them to do so. Politicians have often been careless with classified material, but this will be the first time in recent memory that anyone involved in the committees have been identified as a deliberate leaker. That cannot go without serious consequences, or else politicians and their staffers from both parties will manipulate exposure of secret information for political purposes at their whim.

In fact, it's hard to see how this could have been anything but that kind of manipulation. Critics of the Bush administration have assumed that the leak came from people within the programs, nonpartisans who objected to the orders they were given. If this turns out to be true and he or she was the source for all the leaks, the leaks are anything but non-partisan. The staffer worked for the committee that conducted oversight on these programs, which means that Congress had full knowledge of the programs.

Hopefully, the DoJ will take over this probe immediately, and give us the answers to which we are all entitled as to how our secret efforts to defeat terrorism wound up on our newstands.

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