Waiting for the Sword

" 'He made his displeasure known to Karl,' a presidential counselor told The News. 'He made his life miserable about this.' . . .

"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."

But now, Bush is circling the wagons around Rove, DeFrank writes.

" 'Karl is fighting for his life,' [another] official added, 'but anything he did was done to help George W. Bush. The President knows that and appreciates that.' "

ABC News the Note says DeFrank's story "might be a window into some new White House thinking on how best to position the President in advance of any possible indictments."

Rep. John Conyers Jr. (D-Mich.) this morning blogs that this story doesn't wash with Bush's previous statements.

And blogger Josh Marshall has excerpts from this morning's gaggle, in which McClellan tries to quash the story -- while at the same time not commenting on it.

Waas Details the Case Against Libby

On the National Journal Web site, Murray Waas provides a detailed look, via his sources, at the contradictions between Libby's testimony and that of New York Times reporter Judith Miller.

"One crucial contradiction between Miller and Libby, the sources say, involves a July 8, 2003, breakfast meeting during which the two discussed Valerie Plame, the covert CIA operative whose identity was revealed a week later in a newspaper column and whose husband, Joe Wilson, was a critic of the Bush administration's Iraq policy.

"According to attorneys familiar with his testimony, Libby told the grand jury that at the meeting, he told Miller that Plame had something to do with Wilson's being sent on a controversial CIA-sponsored mission to Africa, but that he did not know that Wilson's wife worked for the CIA or anything else about her.

"However, Miller testified and turned over notes from the July 8 conversation to the grand jury that showed that Libby had told her that Plame worked for the CIA's Weapons, Intelligence, Non-Proliferation, and Arms Control office."