Today’s NY Daily News story is flying around the blogosphere, and justly so, since it alleges that the president of the United States has had guilty knowledge of felonies committed inside his own White House for over two years:
Bush has always known that Rove often talks with reporters anonymously and he generally approved of such contacts, one source said.
But the President felt Rove and other members of the White House damage-control team did a clumsy job in their campaign to discredit Plame’s husband, Joseph Wilson, the ex-diplomat who criticized Bush’s claim that Saddam Hussen tried to buy weapons-grade uranium in Niger.
A second well-placed source said some recently published reports implying Rove had deceived Bush about his involvement in the Wilson counterattack were incorrect and were leaked by White House aides trying to protect the President.
"Bush did not feel misled so much by Karl and others as believing that they handled it in a ham-handed and bush-league way," the source said.
If the story is true — and Josh Marshall has the lowdown on its author’s long-standing ties to Bush insiders — then Bush has been lying for over two years. (Josh’s site, incidentally, is all over this story like nobody else today. One-stop shopping. Go. Read lots. Guy’s terrific.)
Note that Bush was originally not pissed about the crime, which sabotaged national security for short-term political gain. He was just upset that it wasn’t committed elegantly.
Playing I-told-you-so for a moment, this certainly explains Bush’s strange unprovoked proclamations of ignorance which caught my ear in July.
He’d have good reason. When you’ve had people on your own staff committing crimes, and you’ve been lying about your own guilty knowledge for years, sticking to your story would be the only chance of evading unindicted co-conspirator status. Or worse.
For anyone who doesn’t follow what this is all about — maybe you only watch the teevee news, which Jon pulls apart today nicely for the umpteenth time — there’s a fairly exhaustive look at the case at Wikipedia.
