(From the diaries -- Plutonium Page)
"What Did the President Know?" Thank you Dan Froomkin, for putting it out there. His White House Briefing in today's washingtonpost.com is music to my ears.
[T]he CIA leak story is taking on more and more of the trappings of the classic Washington political scandal -- the saving grace for Bush being that his party controls Congress, and that thus far, Republicans have closed ranks behind him.
But get ready for more and more talk about the parallels between this story and the Clinton intern scandal -- and of course, Watergate.
We're already hearing some of the prototypical questions being raised. Here's former presidential adviser David Gergen, on ABC's "This Week" yesterday: "What did the president know and when did he know it?"
We all know how the SCLM loves a good scandal. And when such luminaries of their own as Tim Russert are drawn in, how can they resist? And now the Oval Office is squarely in their sites. For good reason, as Froomkin enumerates in his article. More on the flip.
Froomkin conducts a round-up of the major stories and the major questions in the scandal from the last week of coverage. What it all boils down to is the Oval Office.
Was Bush out of the loop? Did Rove and Libby keep him in the dark when he was demanding the full cooperation of White House staff in the investigation? Or did they let him in on their plan to "disassemble," thereby bringing him smack dab into the middle of a White House cover-up?
While both Bush and Cheney were interviewed by prosecutors on the case in June, 2004, neither were under oath. Have they been asked to testify under oath to the grand jury? We don't know, and if they are, the White House is unlikely to announce it.
And what about then-White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales and the 12 hour head start he gave Andy Card before announcing to the rest of the White House staff that the Justice Department had begun its criminal investigation into the leak? Of course we all know the potential significance of that 12-hour gap before staff knew that they had to preserve all materials relating to the issue. But what about Andy Card? What did he do with that information? Who did he tell? And has he talked to the grand jury? Inquiring minds want to know, but will just have to wait.
While we're still here in blogistan speculating on what all of this means, the SCLM at least is finally speculating on it, too. And even devoting some resources to following the story. I'm not ready to laud them yet. They've got a lot still to prove. But I will say that I'm encouraged, particularly after reading this bit of Froomkin, regarding the initial revelation of the 12 hour Gonzales Gap in October, 2003:
Some Democrats immediately and publicly asked if that delay resulted in the destruction of evidence, and in a letter to Bush a few days later, four Democratic senators asked why the Justice Department allowed Gonzales such a grace period.
McClellan announced that it was "silly" to suggest that the delay indicated that Justice wanted to shield the White House in any way.
Don't remember any of that? Not your fault. It didn't get much ink.
But it's getting a lot of attention today. Why? Possibly because press coverage of the Bush administration, in the first term, failed to sufficiently heed some developments that, in retrospect, seem worthy of more attention.
Something similar happened when the Downing Street Memo first came to light in May. That memo suggested among other things that Bush was already set on invading Iraq long before acknowledging as much in public. In that case, it took the American mainstream press more than a month to acknowledge that it was a story worth writing about again, even though it was, technically, old news.
Old news. Well, if it could dawn on them that the Gonzales Gap and the DSM might have significance even long after their revelations, maybe there's hope that they'll stumble upon the real significance of the Plame affair and the DSM.
All of the lies about who leaked what to whom are all just a cover up of the big lie. The one that took us to war.