Senate Ethics Committee Clears Shelby

National Journal:

"The messages were discussed at length during a closed door session of the Senate Intelligence Committee on June 19, 2002, by Lt. Gen. Michael V. Hayden, the then-director of the National Security Agency. Shortly after the hearing concluded, CNN aired a report disclosing the two messages. The next day, both The Washington Post and USA Today published much more detailed news reports regarding the intercepts. Shelby was at the time the top Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee...read on"

How could the Senate Ethics Committee find no wrong doing from a Senator who immediately passed on classified information to two reporters as soon as he left the meeting and soon after a report appeared on CNN? Why does it take 15 months to investigate this story when obviously there are so few players to actually investigate?

"Had the Ethics Committee probe determined that a Republican senator had leaked sensitive classified information, so soon after the indictment of I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby, the former chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney, the finding would have had wide-ranging political ramifications, Democrat and Republican congressional staffers said in interviews."

That about explains it.