Picking up on David’s post immediately below, this is the key point. Out of all the issues raised in today’s Albuquerque Journal story on the Iglesias firing and any potential sourcing questions, the central fact asserted is that after Sen. Domenici’s pressure call to Iglesias and before Iglesias’s name appeared on the firing list, Sen. Domenici had a conversation about firing Iglesias with President Bush himself.
That places the president at the center of the story and marks him as the likely ‘decider’, shall we say, in Iglesias’s ouster.
If there were any way for the White House to deny that such a call had occurred, they’d do it. But it’s mid-Sunday evening and there hasn’t been a peep. So I think we can be pretty certain that that call did take place as claimed. (The article also reports calls to Gonzales and Rove — so the same inference from silence applies to them too.)
This may also help explain why Karl Rove’s deputy Scott Jennings assumed his White House colleagues knew so much about the Iglesias backstory when he sent them this panicked email as the news of Domenici’s call was breaking.
