Attorney General Eric Holder announced late Friday that a team of U.S. attorneys has been assigned to investigate the disclosure of classified information and prosecute any criminal violations they discover.

McCain says classified leaks done to boost Obama:President Barack Obama's 2008 Republican rival on Tuesday accused senior administration officials of leaking classified information to news organizations to boost the Democrat's national security reputation and re-election chances.


"McCain singled out the recent report in The New York Times, based on anonymous sources, that said Obama secretly had ordered the use of a sophisticated cyberweapon, known as Stuxnet, to attack the computer systems that run Iran's main nuclear enrichment facilities. The senator also cited published reports about the drone campaign against terrorists.

He called on the administration to appoint a special counsel to investigate.

"With the leaks that these articles were based on, our enemies now know much more than they even did the day before they came out about important aspects of the nation's unconventional offensive capability and how we use them. Such disclosures can only undermine similar ongoing or future operations and, in this sense, compromise national security," McCain said on the Senate floor. "For this reason, regardless of how politically useful these leaks may be to the president, they have to stop."

McCain suggested that a "flurry of anonymous boasting" over the operation that killed al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden led to the identification of Dr. Shakil Afridi, the Pakistani physician who helped the United States track down bin Laden. Afridi was recently convicted of high treason and sentenced to 33 years in prison."

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/politics/2018361967_apusobamaclassifiedinformation.html


06/09/12: The Hill describes how President Obama is experiencing a severe role reversal as Republicans in Congress are calling for the White House to appoint a special counsel to investigate a series of classified intelligence leaks. It’s a shift from Obama’s days as a senator, when he was part of Democratic calls for a special counsel and an independent congressional review of two of the Bush Administration’s biggest scandals. The circumstances of then-Senator Obama’s calls for investigations into administration wrongdoing are different than the current situation that his administration faces over national security leaks. But the calls from Congress now and when Obama was a senator have a familiar ring, as the opposition party’s senior senators – including a onetime presidential candidate – went on the offensive against an administration facing criticism." http://www.securitylawbrief.com/