The Covered-Up Meeting

"Some questioned whether information about the July 10 meeting was intentionally withheld from the panel. . . .

"In interviews Saturday and Sunday, commission members said they were never told about the meeting despite hours of public and private questioning with Ms. Rice, Mr. Tenet and Mr. Black, much of it focused specifically on how the White House dealt with terrorist threats in the summer of 2001.

"'None of this was shared with us in hours of private interviews, including interviews under oath, nor do we have any paper on this,' said Timothy J. Roemer, a Democratic member of the commission and a former congressman from Indiana. 'I'm deeply disturbed by this. I'm furious.'"

Peter Baker wrote in Saturday's Washington Post: "The report of such a meeting takes on heightened importance after former president Bill Clinton said this week that the Bush team did not do enough to try to kill Osama bin Laden before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) said her husband would have paid more attention to warnings of a possible attack than Bush did. Rice fired back on behalf of the current president, saying the Bush administration 'was at least as aggressive' in eight months as President Clinton had been in eight years."

There has been a fascinating sequence of not-quite denials from administration officials.

As Baker wrote: "White House and State Department officials [Friday] confirmed that the July 10 meeting took place, although they took issue with Woodward's portrayal of its results. State Department spokesman Sean McCormack, responding on behalf of Rice, said Tenet and Black had never publicly expressed any frustration with her response.

"'This is the first time these thoughts and feelings associated with that meeting have been expressed,' McCormack said. 'People are free to revise and extend their remarks, but that is certainly not the story that was told to the 9/11 commission.'"

That's not much of a defense for a potential cover-up -- saying that no one had ever mentioned it before.

And yet, in a Saturday press release entitled " Five Key Myths in Bob Woodward's Book ," the full extent of the White House's refutation was to quote McCormack.

On Sunday, White House counselor Dan Bartlett issued a new rebuttal on ABC's "This Week with George Stephanopoulos." Here's the video ; here's the transcript .

Speaking for Rice, Bartlett said: "I spoke to her this morning. She believes this is a very grossly mis-accurate characterization of the meeting they had."

Stephanopoulos: "So this didn't happen?"