On the Subject of Leaks, a Talkative President Runs Dry

President Bush was generous of word yesterday when he took questions from a group of students at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.

"I'll be glad to opine on it," he said on the topic of immigration.

"Kind of rambling here," he observed after giving a lengthy discourse on the benefits of freedom.

"I'm getting wound up," he confessed on the subject of protectionism.

"I'm not going to filibuster, I promise," he said, midway through an 865-word answer to a question about governing philosophy.

But then a second-year master's student asked about "Prosecutor Fitzgerald" and White House leaks to punish a critic. You could practically hear the zipper sealing the president's lips.

"Yes, no, I, this is, there's an ongoing legal proceeding which precludes me from talking a lot about the case," the president finally managed to say. All he could answer, Bush said, was that he declassified a National Intelligence Estimate because "it made sense for people to see the truth."

That answer neatly encapsulated the White House's response to the CIA leak imbroglio: No comment and non sequitur.

As for the non sequitur, it's true that Bush declassified the NIE, on July 18, 2003. But this was after vice presidential aide I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby had done his leaking -- with Bush and Vice President Cheney's blessing, Libby has testified. And the NIE said nothing about administration critic Joseph C. Wilson IV and his CIA-employed wife, whose unmasking started the whole scandal.

Nor is the White House's no-comment ending the questioning. Bush had no problem commenting on an ongoing legal proceeding when he said he believed that Tom DeLay (R-Tex.), the indicted former House majority leader, was innocent. "Presidential prerogative," White House spokesman Scott McClellan said then.

Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.), the Senate Judiciary Committee chairman, recommends that Bush exercise his prerogative again. "I think that there has to be a detailed explanation precisely as to what Vice President Cheney did, what the president said to him, and an explanation from the president as to what he said so that it can be evaluated," Specter said on "Fox News Sunday."

The White House, evidently, is unmoved by Specter's suggestion. McClellan referred 16 times in his briefings yesterday to the "ongoing" leak case as his reason for not commenting -- as when CBS News's Bill Plante tried to plumb the timing of the leaks.