'Move On'? Not So Fast, Mr. President

President Bush made several unsupported assertions about the war in Iraq during his press conference yesterday (scroll down for some examples), but when it comes to sheer audacity, nothing came close to his response when asked how he felt about two of his top advisers leaking Valerie Plame's identity as a CIA agent to reporters.

Jennifer Loven gets it right in her Associated Press story: "President Bush always said he would wait to talk about the CIA leak case until after the investigation into his administration's role. On Thursday, he skipped over that step and pronounced the matter old news hardly worth discussing.

"'It's run its course,' he said. 'Now we're going to move on.'

"Despite a long history of denouncing leaks, Bush declined to express any disappointment in the people who worked for him and who were involved in disclosing the name of a CIA operative. Asked about that . . . the president gave a dodgy answer.

"'It's been a tough issue for a lot of people in the White House,' he said.

"He didn't even acknowledge the undisputed fact that someone working for him was the source, saying only that 'perhaps somebody in the administration did disclose the name of that person.'"

In fact, Bush clearly seemed to be pointing his finger not at the two senior White House aides who leaked Plame's identity to reporters -- senior political adviser Karl Rove and former vice presidential chief of staff I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby -- but at former deputy secretary of state Richard L. Armitage.

Said Bush: "I'm aware of the fact that perhaps somebody in the administration did disclose the name of that person, and I've often thought about what would have happened had that person come forth and said, 'I did it.' Would we have had this, you know, endless hours of investigation and a lot of money being spent on this matter?"

But, as Michael Abramowitz writes in The Washington Post, Armitage was actually the only one of those three who immediately copped to his role: "Armitage did tell senior State Department officials what he had done after he realized he might have been the source for Novak's column. One of them called then-White House counsel Alberto R. Gonzales to report that the State Department possessed information relevant to the leak investigation and had already contacted the Justice Department.

"The aide, former State Department lawyer Will Taft, asked Gonzales if he wanted to know the details. Gonzales said no, according to 'Hubris,' a book on the case by journalists Michael Isikoff and David Corn."

So what about Rove and Libby? What about Vice President Cheney's shadowy role in the whole matter? What about Bush's vow to punish the leakers? And what did Bush himself know, and when did he know it? (See my July 3 and May 29 columns, for starters.)

John Dickerson writes for Slate that Bush's dodge was particularly disingenuous considering that "[f]or the last two weeks the president and his aides have asserted that Bush was deep in contemplation over the details of the Libby case as he weighed whether to commute the sentence." Despite that, Dickerson notes, "on the larger, four-year episode with national security implications, the inquisitive chief executive asserts he didn't ask a single question of those involved."