A Sidestep and a Backtrack

The Hadley E-Mail

John Solomon writes for the Associated Press about an e-mail Rove apparently sent then-deputy national security adviser Stephen Hadley on July 11, 2003.

" 'I didn't take the bait,' Rove wrote in the message, disclosed to The Associated Press. . . .

"'Matt Cooper called to give me a heads-up that he's got a welfare reform story coming. . . . When he finished his brief heads-up he immediately launched into Niger. Isn't this damaging? Hasn't the president been hurt? I didn't take the bait, but I said if I were him I wouldn't get Time far out in front on this.' "

Falling Off Message

Paul Harris writes in the Observer: "The so-called 'Valerie Plame affair' has the Bush administration in a panic."

U.S. News writes that "for now, the issue has upset what passes for the balance of power in Washington. . . .

"Whatever the case, the normally hypereffective White House spin machine threw a rod.' . . .

"Senior White House officials fretted that the controversy would depress President Bush's public approval ratings still further and considered mounting a public defense, but they opted to wait out the storm, expecting the issue, eventually, to blow away. 'Rove is personally cool as a cucumber,' said one adviser. 'He has a heck of a lot more information than the rest of us.' "

Opinion Watch

Bob Schieffer had a commentary on CBS's Face the Nation yesterday: "What if the president had just called in his top people in the beginning of all this, and said, 'Folks, we have a problem here. I need to know who's been talking to Bob Novak...' That's what presidents used to do, and they're usually pretty good at finding out, when they really want to know. . . .

"Instead, this White House did what it usually does when challenged: It went into attack mode. . . .

"Now, two years and millions of tax dollars later, the president's trusted friend and strategist, Karl Rove, has emerged as the top suspect and we're left to wonder: Can anything said from the White House podium be taken at face value? Or does the White House just deny automatically anything that reflects badly on it?"

John Tierney writes in the New York Times: "What do you call a scandal that's not scandalous?

"Nadagate."

Frank Rich writes in the New York Times: "This case is about Iraq, not Niger. The real victims are the American people, not the Wilsons. The real culprit - the big enchilada, to borrow a 1973 John Ehrlichman phrase from the Nixon tapes - is not Mr. Rove but the gang that sent American sons and daughters to war on trumped-up grounds and in so doing diverted finite resources, human and otherwise, from fighting the terrorists who attacked us on 9/11. That's why the stakes are so high: this scandal is about the unmasking of an ill-conceived war, not the unmasking of a C.I.A. operative who posed for Vanity Fair."

Jonathan Alter writes in Newsweek column that "for all of the complexities of the Valerie Plame case, for all the questions raised about the future of investigative journalism and the fate of the most influential aide to an American president since Louis Howe served Franklin D. Roosevelt 70 years ago, this story is fundamentally about how easy it was to get into Iraq and how hard it will be to get out."

Stanley Crouch writes in the New York Daily News: "If things get much worse for Rove, we will find ourselves at another of those points when a spotlight is cast upon the nature of our American system, its resilience and its hard won ability to deal with the abuse of power."

Cartoon Watch

Slate's Cartoon Box and Daryl Cagle 's professional cartoon index are both collecting Karl Rove political cartoons. Quite the treasure troves.

Covert Ops in Iraq?

Seymour Hersh writes in the New Yorker that despite congressional objections, the White House went ahead with a plan to covertly manipulate Iraq's Jan. 30 elections in favor of Ayad Allawi, who had been installed by the United States as Iraq's interim prime minister.

"I was informed by several former military and intelligence officials that the activities were kept, in part, 'off the books' -- they were conducted by retired C.I.A. officers and other non-government personnel, and used funds that were not necessarily appropriated by Congress," Hersh writes.

"In my reporting for this story, one theme that emerged was the Bush Administration's increasing tendency to turn to off-the-books covert actions to accomplish its goals. This allowed the Administration to avoid the kind of stumbling blocks it encountered in the debate about how to handle the elections: bureaucratic infighting, congressional second-guessing, complaints from outsiders."

Dafna Linzer writes in The Washington Post: "President Bush authorized covert plans last year to support the election campaigns of Iraqis with close ties to the White House, but government and intelligence officials said yesterday the plan was scrapped before the January vote."

She writes that administration officials dispute several of Hersh's claims.

Douglas Jehl and David E. Sanger write in the New York Times: "In a statement issued in response to questions about a report in the next issue of The New Yorker, Frederick Jones, the spokesman for the National Security Council, said that 'in the final analysis, the president determined and the United States government adopted a policy that we would not try - and did not try - to influence the outcome of the Iraqi election by covertly helping individual candidates for office.'

"The statement appeared to leave open the question of whether any covert help was provided to parties favored by Washington, an issue about which the White House declined to elaborate."

Supreme Court Watch

Peter Baker writes in The Washington Post: "President Bush, accelerating his search for a new Supreme Court justice, appears to have narrowed his list of candidates to no more than a few finalists and could announce his decision in the next few days, Republican strategists informed about White House plans said yesterday....

"As Bush interviews his finalist or finalists, the White House has kept secret his paring-down process. Some advisers said they increasingly believe the president may pick a woman to replace O'Connor, the nation's first female justice, just as first lady Laura Bush publicly urged him to do last week. 'There's a lot more focus on a woman,' one GOP strategist said."

In Bush's radio address on Saturday, he said: "My nominee will be a fair-minded individual who represents the mainstream of American law and American values."

Novak Watch I: Novak Stays

Lisa de Moraes writes in The Washington Post: "Robert Novak will not get the sack as contributor to CNN for his role in the outing of CIA operative Valerie Plame, at least while an investigation is being conducted, CNN/US president Jonathan Klein said yesterday."

Novak Watch II: Card Goes?

Robert Novak wrote in his syndicated column yesterday: "Super-lobbyist Ed Gillespie has been given his own office in the West Wing of the White House to manage President Bush's Supreme Court confirmation battle. That raised speculation Gillespie could be chief of staff for the end of the Bush presidency. . . .

"Insiders believe Gillespie, a protege of Bush political adviser Karl Rove, is being groomed to replace Andrew Card as chief of staff for Bush's last two years as president."

Tonight's Big Dinner

Roxanne Roberts writes in The Washington Post: "There's a big black-tie dinner at the White House tonight. President Bush will don a tuxedo and might even stay up past 10. This is, as they say in Texas, rarer than hen's teeth.

"The dinner for Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh (technically an 'official' instead of 'state' dinner because Singh is head of government but not the state) is notable as one of the few grand parties of this administration. The White House has hosted only four state dinners since Bush took office in 2001; the last one was held in October 2003 for the president of Kenya. It's a big deal for India, and for the White House."

Cheney's Acid Reflux

The Associated Press reports: "Vice President Dick Cheney has a mild case of esophagitis and some small dilation of the arteries behind both knees, his office said Saturday after he completed a two-part annual physical....

"Esophagitis frequently occurs when acid-containing fluid flows from the stomach back into the esophagus."

End of a Super Double Secret

Cooper talked to Howard Kurtz on CNN yesterday, and solved one of the lesser mysteries of the case.

"KURTZ: A lot of people have picked up on your description in the memos to your bureau chief of that conversation -- 'It was on double super secret background.' What did that mean?

"COOPER: Well, Howie, I can now reveal that it was a joke. Karl Rove, when we had the conversation, wanted it to be on deep background, which I took to mean I could use the material but not quote it directly, and certainly not attribute it, that I had to protect the identity of my source. When I wrote the note to my bureau chief, just moments after the conversation with Rove, in a slightly playful way, I echoed the line in the movie 'Animal House,' where John Belushi's wild fraternity is put on double secret probation. So it was a little bit of humor. . . . "