Roger Ailes [*] has found a written directive from the Bush Administration on how agencies that handle classified information should deal with unauthorized disclosures.
Departments and agencies should continue to report these crimes to the Department of Justice under established reporting requirements, and should not delay their internal investigations pending the Department’s prosecutorial decision on the matter, unless the Attorney General directs otherwise in a particular case.
Read the whole thing. A comparison of Attorney General Ashcroft’s order with the actual behavior of the White House in the Valerie Plame affair is instructive. Note also that Ashcroft proposes a statute that would force official suspect of leaking to execute sworn statements as to whether or not they did, in fact, leak. But in this instance, where all the suspects serve at the pleasure of the President, much the same result could be achieved without any new law.