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"Hillary Clinton is asking us, as Americans, to make her the first president to take the oath of office after already violating that oath," Mukasey said. | Getty Mukasey slams Clinton on email, but blocked classified leak probe in 2008

Ex-Attorney General Michael Mukasey used his Republican National Convention speaking slot Tuesday night to blast Hillary Clinton over her carelessness with classified information, but Mukasey helped throw a major roadblock in the path of an investigation into improper leaking of such information less than a decade ago.

"How she treated government secrets as secretary of state, and what she said before and after she was caught, sums up the case against her," Mukasey declared in Cleveland Tuesday. "Hillary Clinton is asking us, as Americans, to make her the first president to take the oath of office after already violating that oath."

However, when confronted with a congressional request for details about the leak of CIA officer Valerie Plame's identity during President George W. Bush's administration, Mukasey persuaded Bush to invoke executive privilege to keep key evidence from a House committee investigating the episode.

Mukasey's face-off with Congress followed the conclusion of Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald's criminal investigation into how Plame's identity as a CIA officer went public. Fitzgerald prosecuted no one for the leak, but charged Vice President Dick Cheney's Chief of Staff Scooter Libby with perjury, making false statements to investigators and obstruction of justice over his statements during the probe.

A jury convicted Libby on four of the five counts against him and he was sentenced to two-and-a-half years in prison.

After the trial and sentencing had concluded, the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee subpoenaed prosecutors' interviews with top White House aides, as well as Bush and Cheney, although the request for Bush's interview was eventually dropped.

While panel Chairman Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) and ranking member Rep. Tom Davis (R-Va.) insisted they needed that information to assess how classified information was or was not safeguarded, Mukasey insisted that concerns about the confidentiality of presidential advice and about future Justice Department investigations should take priority over the congressional inquiry, at least with respect to some information.

"The Committee insists that the Department provide it with unredacted copies of all of the subpoenaed documents except your interview report. In my view, such a production would chill deliberations among future White House officials and impede future Department of Justice criminal investigations involving official White House conduct," Mukasey wrote to Bush on July 15, 2008. "Accordingly ... it is my considered legal judgment that it would be legally permissible for you to assert executive privilege with respect to the subpoenaed documents, and I respectfully request that you do so."

In a report responding to the executive privilege invocation, Waxman and Davis called Mukasey's advice on the topic "flawed." The lawmakers said the action frustrated the panel's effort to determine "whether senior White House officials complied with requirements governing the handling of classified information" — a quite similar focus to the charges Mukasey and other Republicans have leveled at Clinton.

Libby never went to prison. Bush commuted his sentence to remove the prison time, but left in place probation and a $250,000 fine. Cheney pushed for a full pardon to clear Libby's record, but Bush turned that down.

It was eventually shown that the first leak of Plame's identity came not from any White House official, but Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, who was at odds with the White House on many issues. Neither he nor anyone else was ever charged with the leak.