McCain: Obama Leaking Security Info to Bolster Campaign

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) has accused the Obama administration of leaking classified information regarding intelligence operations in order to benefit Barack Obama’s reelection by strengthening Obama’s foreign policy credentials.

On CBS “This Morning,” McCain charged, “This is the most highly classified information and it’s now been leaked by the administration at the highest levels at the White House and that’s not acceptable.” He intimated that the White House was “breaching national security” either by leaking the information or tacitly encouraging it.

“It makes the president look very decisive; and it gives very little credit to the other men and women who make these things happen,” the Arizona Senator stated. “This puts American lives in danger, revealing our most highly classified operations both in cyberwar and in drones.”

Even if the information had been leaked by other sources, McCain said, the White House was acting dangerously by confirming the data: “All they had to do was say ‘this is classified information and we won’t discuss it.’ And administration officials at the highest levels confirmed these facts, they obviously shouldn’t have done that.”

McCain also called for a special counsel to investigate the matter. Last week, the New York Times revealed how U.S. and Israeli intelligence agencies manufactured viruses to disrupt work at an Iranian nuclear facility.

The Obama administration has been playing a double game with respect to Iran for some time. They publicly condemn Iran’s nuclear activity, but four times they have revealed Israel’s plans to use other countries’ airspace for an attack on Iran. It is no surprise that Obama will use anything to bolster his reelection campaign, especially given the Obama Administration’s hostility toward Israel and friendliness with the Arab Spring.

Predictably, Senate Democrats eschewed the idea that Obama was exploiting classified information for political purposes. Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin (D-Mich.) defended Obama: “I just can’t believe that there’s a decision in any kind of a formal way to leak this kind of a thing,” he said on Tuesday.