Senate Republicans to Obama: You're Lying or New York Times is Lying; which is it?

Senate Republicans have decided to swing at the slow, high-hanging softball that Barack Obama and the New York Times gave them yesterday. It's laughably obvious that when Obama said he found it "offensive" to suggest that his White House leaked national security secrets to the New York Times, someone was lying because the Times article referred to "three dozen" former and current White House employees who provided them the information.

Via the Weekly Standard:

President Obama at a press conference this morning insisted that high-level national security leaks are not coming from the White House. "The notion that my White House would purposefully release classified information is offensive," President Obama said.

But a Republican memo from the Senate Republican Policy Committee maintains that either the president or the New York Times is wrong.

"It would appear the President’s statement and the New York Times statements directly conflict with each other and cannot both be true at the same time," the memo states.

For proof, the memo highlights Obama's denial that the White House is responsible for the leaks and certain statements in the Times's stories.

"If that statement were meant to serve as a denial that the Obama Administration leaked classified information, it would appear to stand in direct contrast to the New York Times article describing the President’s personal involvement in a process  'to designate terrorists for kill or capture,'" the memo states. "One of the opening paragraphs described the methodology for compiling the story, saying 'three dozen' of the President’s 'current and former advisers' were interview sources for the story."

Perhaps the biggest indicator that it is Obama who is lying is that the Managing Editor for the New York Times actually threw his own paper under the bus to a competitor - POLITICO:

“I can’t believe anybody who says these are leaks,” Times Managing Editor Dean Baquet told POLITICO. “Read those stories. They are so clearly the product of tons and tons of reporting.”

Obama appeared to point to those comments Friday when he stated: “The writers of these articles have all stated unequivocally that [the information] didn’t come from this White House.”

Isn't it obvious what's going on? The New York Times told the truth then, in the article about where it got its information; Obama is lying about the White House not being a source; and the New York Times is lying now to run interference for Obama.

So to answer the Senate Republican Policy Committee's question about who's lying, the answer is "both."