then if they prevail legally. For then no classified project or person is safe from unauthorized disclosure. That would enable any president to disclose information for political purposes. If this legal precedent is established the implications of what might follow are chilling.  

that Cheney has absolute privilege to put the Valerie Plame's life and the lives of everyone in her networks in danger... and not care at all that anyone could be killed because of his actions.

Isn't the Office of the Vice President distinct from the Executive Branch?

At least that's what it argues when it wants to be exempt from reporting requirements that apply to reporting statistics about classification and declassification of documents.

At those times, the OVP is completely independent of the Executive Branch.

However, in this instance, it is asserting itself as virtually identical with the Presidency.

With this crowd, words, offices, the Constitution itself only ever means just precisely what they want them to mean... in any given situation.

Nothing is real. Everything is permissible.

The is a long-established protocol to follow to declassify information.  The reason that the legal defense has been "she wasn't covert" as opposed to "it was legal to reveal her covert status" is because the latter defense is so obviously pathetic and, indeed, treasonous.  The trouble for any possible prosecutor is that it will carry a lot of weight in court, even if it is political suicide.  

The legal defense would be "the President (or Vice President) declassified her covert status".  Of course, they would then have to explain why this declassification was never done properly, never relayed to the CIA, what its motivation was, etc., etc.  

but I think they are trying to defend Cheney's right to insta-declassify the NIE not Plame's covert status. Wouldn't Cheney and Libby have violated IIPA(subsection c) if he claims he declassified Plame's status and then told Libby to spread the information? Subsection c doesn't say the information needs to be classified, just that the information exposes the identity of a covert agent to a person who is not authorized to receive classified information.    

even low information folks can understand the difference between declassifying documents and declassifying information regarding the status of an agent which puts lives at risk.

And, the point is -- well, what is the point?  Why declassify info on Plame's status and not others as well.  Yes, I already know the answer.

Thanks Marcy for a great diary.

Davis' line of questioning - I could easily be wrong - but I got the sense that he was establishing the President's right to declassify because the White House may be getting ready to say that Bush ordered the whole thing - or at least leaving the door open to make that claim in case the investigation gets close enough to do  harm to Cheney.

Further along this line of thinking, the fact that there was no internal White House investigation then becomes easily explained; and a pardon for Scooter Libby or even a reversal (maybe) becomes plausibly explained.

I think they are at the point where they are making this up as they go along now.  The Cheney defense is extremely plausible, but the Bush defense may be the slam dunk they will use to end this saga.   Retreating into the realm of Executive Priviledge is so very BushCo...  They really thought they weren't going to get caught.

Removing the question of whether the President's so-called absolute privilege extends to the Vice President, there are still limits to the privilege.

First, the Executives are sworn to defend against all enemies foreign and domestic; are they going to say that Joe Wilson and Valerie Plame are enemies?  How do they prove that these two people were so very dangerous to the welfare of the U.S. that they had a need to avoid all declassification purposes to tackle the immediacy of the threat they allegedly represented?  They had weeks and months to deal with any threat they felt; would it not have been reasonable to simply declassify rather than leak?  And in hindsight, with Joe Wilson being correct about uranium from Niger, how can they justify any claim that Wilson was a threat?

Second, even insta-declassification must have some follow-up obligation for filing with appropriate bodies that info has been declassified.  How is it that the CIA has never seen any declassification documents in regards to Plame's ID?  Isn't this rather like the investigation into the leak that never happened per Knodell?

If I recall, there was a signing statement that extended some authority to the Vice President that is normally given to the President.  Does anyone recall this?  And if so, do you recall what the specific authority was?