Bush's Final Jeopardy

Elizabeth de la Vega boils down the latest revelations regarding Bush's role in the NIE leak from July 2003, which preceded and, in a sense, laid the groundwork for the outing of Valerie Plame, to one question:

Is a President, on the eve of his reelection campaign, legally entitled to ward off political embarrassment and conceal past failures in the exercise of his office by unilaterally and informally declassifying selected -- as well as false and misleading -- portions of a classified National Intelligence Estimate that he has previously refused to declassify, in order to cause such information to be secretly disclosed under false pretenses in the name of a "former Hill staffer" to a single reporter, intending that reporter to publish such false and misleading information in a prominent national newspaper?

Obviously, she declares, the answer is no. "Such a misuse of authority is the very essence of a criminal conspiracy to defraud the United States. It is also precisely the abuse of executive power that led to the impeachment of Richard M. Nixon."