Usually historians wait decades to get the inside accounts of what happens at the heart of the US government, but the legal skirmishes between lawyers representing Lewis "Scooter" Libby, the vice-president's former chief-of-staff, and Patrick Fitzgerald, special prosecutor, are proving unusually revealing and damaging to the administration.

Last week, attention focused on a claim in one of the legal filings that President George W. Bush had authorised Mr Libby to leak parts of the national intelligence estimates (NIE), to build the case for war in Iraq. Although Mr Bush has the legal power to declassify documents, the revelation made his own assault on leaks look like hypocrisy.