This could be the beginning of the end of the Bush administration: Scooter Libby told Patrick Fitzgerald's grand jury that Bush authorized him to leak the top-secret National Intelligence Estimate to NY Times reporter Judy Miller on 7/8/03 as part of the Bush administration's character assassination campaign against Joe Wilson.

The Corporate Media is trying to minimize the explosiveness of this revelation by claiming that Bush did not specifically authorize the leak of Valerie Plame's identity, which is the crime everyone is waiting to see solved.

But the story is still explosive in many ways:

• Bush may have authorized the outing of Plame - we just don't know yet! Until today, we didn't know that Bush authorized the leak of the NIE.
• Bush has now been tied directly to Scooter Libby's character assassination campaign against Joe Wilson. Until now, we only knew that Karl Rove and Dick Cheney were involved. If there was a criminal conspiracy to expose Valerie Plame, then a prosecutor could easily establish probable cause that Bush was involved with it - even if he did not specifically authorize her outing.
• Bush's repeated on-camera denunciations of leaks are being played over and over on TV, making him look like a hypocrite and a liar.
• Bush certainly has the power to declassify secrets, but he has to go through formal procedures or he is breaking the law. Bush did not formally declassify the NIE until 7/18/03, but he authorized Libby to leak it to Judy Miller 10 days earlier - which would be a crime.
• In fact, Judy Miller received crucial information from the NIE in early September 2002 - a month before Congress received it - which she included in her front-page NY Times story on 9/8/02. (See Booman's point-by-point comparison of Miller's article and the NIE.) Immediately after Miller's story was published, Dick Cheney went on Meet the Press to hype it - perhaps the most important "war drum" he banged at the start of the fall "marketing campaign" led by Andy Card and the infamous White House Iraq Group (WHIG).
• After the NY Times exposed the NSA wiretapping scandal, Alberto Gonzales launched a very public investigation of the leak to the Times, with the clear threat of subpoenas for the Times reporters who received the leak. Gonzales can forget about issuing those subpoenas now because lawyers for the Times will immediately scream "selective prosecution"!

Update 1: Rep. Jane Harman (D-CA), the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, is furious at the "Leaker-in-Chief" (courtesy of Raw Story):

If the disclosure is true, it's breathtaking. The President is revealed as the Leaker-in-Chief.

Leaking classified information to the press when you want to get your side out or silence your critics is not appropriate.

The reason we classify things is to protect our sources - those who risk their lives to give us secrets. Who knows how many sources were burned by giving Libby this 'license to leak'?

If I had leaked the information, I'd be in jail. Why should the President be above the law?

The President has the legal authority to declassify information, but there are normal channels for doing so. Telling an aide to leak classified information to the New York Times is not a normal channel. A normal declassification procedure would involve going back to the originating agency, such as the CIA, and then putting out a public, declassified version of the document.

I am stunned that the President won't tell the full the Intelligence Committee about the NSA program because he's allegedly concerned about leaks, when it turns out that he is the Leaker-in-Chief.