Jake Tapper
ABC News
2/4/2010
From Sunlen Miller:
The ranking Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee, Sen. Kit Bond, R-Mo., dismissed the White House’s call for him to apologize for alleging that the administration leaked information about Umar Farouk Abdulmuttalab for political reasons.
“After telling me to keep my mouth shut, the White House discloses sensitive information in an effort to defend a dangerous and unpopular decision to Mirandize Abdulmutallab and I’m supposed to apologize?” Sen. Bond said in a paper statement today.
Bond’s statement followed White House press secretary Robert Gibbs’ strongly-worded suggestion today that the Senator owed an apology to the law enforcement community and those who work in the White House.
Gibbs took issue with Bond’s letter sent this afternoon to President Obama in which he said the “release of this sensitive information” about the interrogation of Abdulmutallab by the White House has “no doubt been helpful” to Abdulmutallab’s “terrorist cohorts around the world.”
Bond received a briefing on Monday from FBI officials and he says they then “stressed the importance of not disclosing the fact of his cooperation in order to protect on-going and follow-on operations to neutralize additional threats to the American public,” Bond wrote in a letter to the president today, “FBI Director Bob Mueller personally stressed to me that keeping the fact of his cooperation quiet was vital to preventing future attacks against the United States.”
Robert Gibbs said today “no briefing is done here or anywhere in this administration where classified information is used in a place where it shouldn’t be,” and demanded an apology.
One that – as of now – he won’t get from the Senator.
