Bush Authorized the Leak

It looks like Scooter Libby is not going to go down gently; he's going to hang onto Bush and Cheney for dear life, and if they get dragged down, so be it. Now he says that Bush authorized the leak, and some folks are saying that Bush had the authority to do that. Time out, folks. I used to work with classified information. Once something was declassified, it was declassified. Notices were given, markings were changed and any use of it by anybody was governed by the new classification. Bush could have done that; there are procedures. But that's not what he did. He authorized giving classified information to someone who had neither the requisite security clearance nor the need to know. Anyone looking to find a record of when Bush declassified the information in question is going to look in vain, because it wasn't declassified. And if the information had been properly declassified, there wouldn't be any case at this point because the laws only prohibit disclosure of classified information.
I can't remember the penalties for disclosure of classified information; I remember the steps necessary to safeguard it, and I remember that the penalties were severe. Maybe we'll reach critical mass on criminal charges and Bushie can rot in a penitentiary.