The Waiting Game

At the Washington Monthly, Kevin Drum is hardly surprised:

"Well, of course the report is going to harden the political battle lines around the war. But that's never worried the White House before. So why the ridiculous suggestion that Petraeus and Crocker testify only in closed session? They couldn't possibly have believed that anyone would agree to that.

"I suppose the conclusion we're supposed to draw is that the Petraeus/Crocker report is going to be negative and the White House is getting worried about losing Republican support. But this sounds more like expectations management to me than anything else. If everyone is expecting a bombshell, a merely mediocre report will end up being greeted with relief. And at this point, relief is probably about the best the White House can hope for."

If conservatives out there are defending the latest maneuver, I haven't found those posts. Maybe they're all on vacation.

More damaging detail is emerging about what Gonzo did in that hospital-room confrontation:

"John Ashcroft was 'barely articulate,' 'feeble' and 'clearly stressed' as he sat in a hospital room chair in March 2004 when top White House aides unsuccessfully tried to persuade him, as the Attorney General, to sign an extension for warrantless domestic eavesdropping on Americans, according to notes made by Robert S. Mueller III, the director of the F.B.I.

"Mr. Mueller's notes of his visit to Mr. Ashcroft's hospital room provide another eyewitness account of the dramatic confrontation over the secret surveillance program," says the New York Times. "They confirm an account of the encounter given by James B. Comey, the former deputy attorney general, who testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee about it in May.

"Mr. Mueller's typed notes, which are undated, also reveal a series of meetings earlier and later that month between the F.B.I. director and other administration officials, including Mr. Comey, Alberto R. Gonzales, then White House Counsel and General Michael V. Hayden, then the director of the National Security Agency, which conducted the electronic monitoring program.

"At one point in a meeting with Mr. Mueller, the notes show, Mr. Gonzales said that even he was 'barred' from getting as much information as he wanted about the highly classified eavesdropping program, because of strict White House secrecy rules."

Why go to all that trouble when they could have just steamrolled the program through Congress, as the White House recently did?

Is Tony Snow about to bail? Here's what he said on Hugh Hewitt's radio show:

HEWITT: Are there any other resignations upcoming, Tony Snow?