Their story: There might be a bad man in the White House and the President is fully cooperating to root the bad man out. The President wants the truth just as much as you do.
The real story: If he wanted to determine the truth, President Bush could have taken action on July 14.
Inaction is a harder story to relate than action, but inaction is the story here. Robert Novak's column, in which he outed CIA employee Valerie Plame and wrote that "[t]wo senior administration officials told me Wilson's wife suggested sending him to Niger," appeared in the Washington Post on July 14, 2003. Seventy-six days ago. It has taken Bush 76 days to say the words, "I want to know the truth."
He could have said this, and acted on it, July 14. He didn't.
Why not? That's the story.
Imagine for a moment that Bill Clinton were President. And a liberal columnist, citing "two senior administration officials," casually outed a CIA agent while attempting to trash one of Clinton's loudest and most effective critics. What would every conservative in America have expected at that moment?
The same thing we all should have expected of President Bush on July 14: Find the leakers and punish them.
Duh.
It is telling that George W. Bush did not do this on his own on July 14. It is almost impossible to conceive that he was unaware of Robert Novak's revelation then or, at a minimum, very soon after. If veteran reporter Novak falsely claimed that "senior administration officials" gave him his information, that would be an extremely unusual sort of lie or mistake from a professional Washington journalist of any political persuasion. Far more likely--a safe assumption even--is that Novak really did get his information from the sources he claimed. By any reasonable standard, Novak's claim needed to be taken seriously.
You'd think the President would want to know: Did someone in my own administration use classified information in this way? Why did President Bush not demand--via, say, a meeting or phone calls or memos to his senior officials (a finite and identifiable group of people)--that the leakers must come forward and identify themselves to him?
Article comments
1 - Steve Rhodes
But remember Bush doesn't actually read articles. Perhaps Condi neglected to brief him on it.
2 - Brian Flemming
You make a good point.
I wonder if that statement in the Fox interview that he doesn't read "opinion" pieces was planned to support his future claim of ignorance about the Novak piece.
But, of course, if Condi did in fact fail to brief him on it (in the context of, say, requesting a freaking investigation of the apparent breach of her department) for so much as a day, let alone 76 days or so, she'd deserve to be fired.
Of course, Bush almost certainly knew about this whole thing on July 14. But I wonder if he'll claim not to have known for much longer. He's told bigger lies.