So many leaks are coming fast and furious now in the Plame/Fitzgerald case that it’s hard to know sometimes where they’re coming from or what the leakers were trying to achieve. Perhaps the best example of this was yesterday’s Daily News story by Tom DeFrank, which provided the first clear evidence that President Bush has known who the culprits were from the beginning and possibly failed to disclose that to Patrick Fitzgerald in their interview last year.
Why would White House officials sell the president out like that? The question becomes more pointed when you note that DeFrank, as we discussed yesterday, has long been close to people in the Bush world.
So what’s the story?
According to knowledgeable sources, those White House officials behind that story were trying to help the president, not hurt him. The story, in their view, was about his unhappiness with what Rove had done but his loyalty to those who work for him.
Now, the first thing you have to say on this is that there are some folks in the White House who are pretty stupid. Even a cursory knowledge of where the live wires lay in this story would tell you that those bits of information would lead to someone getting a very big shock.
Ordinarily, such an elementary mistake just wouldn’t happen.
This part is just inference, not reporting. But I suspect that what we’re seeing here is an example of various players in the White House trying to manage damage control without central direction, perhaps without the requisite experience in some cases and even more likely without all the key facts at hand.
The limbs keep moving even after the head is severed, but not with the same coordination.
