Back in 1998, when I was excoriating President Clinton for perjury and obstruction of justice, I had plenty of Republican company. This, my Republican friends and I agreed, was serious business.

But some Clinton-bashing conservatives have reacted rather differently to the alleged grand jury perjuries, lies to the FBI, and obstruction of justice for which I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby, Vice President Cheney’s former chief of staff, stands indicted.

These conservatives go beyond claiming that the evidence that Libby lied is weak — which is fair game, albeit unpersuasive (in my view) — to trivializing any cover-up as not very serious anyway. They remind me of the many Democrats who trivialized Clinton’s multiple perjuries and suborning of perjury as mere "lying about sex."

These days, the leader of the who-cares-about-perjury pack is The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page — the "Daily Diatribe of the American Right," as it was called in the headline of a 1989 American Lawyer piece (by me).

In 1998, The Journal saw criminal cover-ups — even of matters that were not themselves crimes — as a big deal. "The latest Clinton scandal involving Monica Lewinsky is titillating because of sex," The Journal editorialized then, "but it derives its legal and political importance from the issues of perjury and obstruction of justice."

Back then, other respected conservatives — Mary Matalin and William Kristol, for example — were even more emphatic about what Matalin called Clinton’s "perjury, suborning perjury, obstruction of justice, conspiracy." They have a far more dismissive view of the evidence of high-level lies underpinning the indictment of Libby and the near-indictment of Karl Rove.

Comes now Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, a man not known for legal acuity, with a threat to prosecute The New York Times and other news media for publishing leaks of classified information.

Gonzales, who launched a major investigation late last year into such leaks, claimed in a May 21 ABC News interview that Congress has made a "policy judgment" that in some circumstances journalists should be prosecuted for publishing classified information.

This assertion is misleading at best. The 89-year-old espionage law to which Gonzales was mainly referring was not intended to prosecute anybody for publishing anything and has never been so used. This is an administration that has not hesitated to leak classified information that makes it look good — but calls it criminal for others to publish leaks that make it look bad.

Its most bitter complaints have been aimed at the Pulitzer-Prize-winning disclosure by The New York Times on December 16 of President Bush’s previously secret, warrantless eavesdropping program. Some serious scholars see that program as violating criminal provisions of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. I don’t, because the murkiness of the legal issues may absolve Bush of criminal intent.

But exposing arguably illegal presidential activities is what the First Amendment freedoms of speech and press are all about. Bush is a shameless demagogue for denouncing as a "shameful act" the exposure of his own circumvention (if not violation) of FISA.

Someone should tell Gonzales and Bush that the relevant congressional "policy judgment" here — one shared by the Constitution’s Framers — is that the president is not a law unto himself.