WASHINGTON – The Republican chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee said Sunday that President Bush should speak publicly about a leak of classified intelligence that was released to rebut an Iraq war critic.

“The president of the United States owes a specific explanation to the American people,” Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., said on Fox News Sunday.

“The president may be entirely in the clear, and it may turn out that he had the authority to make the disclosures which were made,” Specter said. “It was not the right way to go about it because we ought not to have leaks in government.”

Specter was referring to a brief filed last week in the case of I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, the former chief of staff to Vice President Cheney.

Libby told a grand jury in 2004 that Cheney told him Bush had approved revealing portions of a National Intelligence Estimate regarding Iraq’s alleged attempt to buy uranium from Niger, according to the brief filed by special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald.

The brief does not allege that Bush or Cheney were involved in revealing that the wife of war critic Joseph Wilson was a CIA operative.

The leak of the name of Wilson’s wife, Valerie Plame, led to the investigation headed by Fitzgerald.

Fitzgerald says Libby committed perjury and obstruction of justice by not revealing to a grand jury and investigators discussions he had with reporters about Plame. Libby has pleaded not guilty.

Wilson, a former diplomat, said Sunday that Bush and Cheney should disclose what they said in interviews with Fitzgerald’s office in the case.

“It seems to me it is long past time for the White House to come clean on all of this,” Wilson said on ABC’s This Week.

Spokeswomen for Bush and Cheney wouldn’t comment on the case.

Under a 1982 law, it is a felony to disclose the identity of a covert intelligence agent. There is a dispute over whether Plame was technically a “covert” agent, and Fitzgerald has not alleged Libby broke the law.

Wilson has called the disclosure of his wife’s identity part of a White House retaliation for his column in The New York Times on July 6, 2003.

In his column, Wilson challenged Bush’s assertion in his State of the Union speech in January 2003 that Iraq had sought enriched uranium from the African nation of Niger.

The White House considered Wilson’s allegations “a direct attack on the credibility of the vice president (and the president) on a matter of signal importance: the rationale for the war in Iraq,” prosecutors said in papers filed in the Libby case.

Libby’s meeting on July 8, 2003, with New York Times reporter Judith Miller, prosecutors wrote, happened after Cheney told Libby that Bush “specifically had authorized defendant to disclose certain information.”

Libby’s lawyers have challenged Wilson’s credibility in court filings. Wilson had conducted a fact-finding mission to Niger on behalf of the CIA, and the lawyers’ filings said that “contrary to Mr. Wilson’s claims, he did not debunk as forgeries documents suggesting that Iraq was attempting to purchase uranium from Africa.”

Libby’s lawyers said Wilson’s report “was not conclusive.”

The Senate Select Committee of Intelligence also disputed some of Wilson’s contentions.

It said Wilson’s findings did not change any CIA analysts’ assessments that Iraq tried to buy uranium from Africa and disputed Wilson’s claim that his wife did not recommend him for the Niger mission.

In his television interview Sunday, Wilson said CIA officials expressed skepticism of the Niger allegations in the weeks leading to Bush’s State of the Union speech.

Libby said he regarded Plame’s CIA employment as “a peripheral issue” for officials who responded to Wilson’s critique, the prosecution filings also said.

Prosecutors wrote that some documents requested by Libby “could be characterized as reflecting a plan to discredit, punish or seek revenge against” Wilson.