The White House isn’t talking — except to a select few

July 13, 2005

In case you missed it, yesterday’s White House press briefing included one exchange that was quite revealing.

ABC’s Terry Moran noticed that Republican talking points responding to the Rove/Plame fiasco attacked Joseph Wilson with some fairly specific information: Rove’s conversation with Time’s Matt Cooper only lasted two minutes and initially dealt with a separate policy issue. Moran brought up an important point: how, exactly, could this information appear in the GOP talking points unless Rove helped put it there?

Moran: You say you won’t discuss it, but the Republican National Committee and others working obviously on behalf of the White House, they put out this Wilson-Rove research and talking points, distributed to Republican surrogates, which include things like: Karl Rove discouraged a reporter from writing a false story.

And then other Republican surrogates are getting information such as: Cooper, the Time reporter, called Rove on the pretense of discussing welfare reform. Bill Kristol on Fox News, a friendly news channel to you, said that the conversation lasted for two minutes and it was just at the end that Rove discussed this.

So someone is providing this information. Are you, behind the scenes, directing a response to this story?

McClellan: You can talk to the RNC about what they put out. I’ll let them speak to that. What I know is that the president directed the White House to cooperate fully with the investigation. And as part of cooperating fully with that investigation, that means supporting the efforts by the investigators to come to a successful conclusion. And that means not commenting on it from this podium.

Moran: Well…

McClellan: And, no, I understand your question.

Moran: … Fox News and other Republican surrogates are essentially saying that the conversation lasted for two minutes and that the subject was ostensibly welfare reform.
They’re getting that information from here, from Karl Rove.

McClellan: And, again, you’re asking questions that are related to news reports about an ongoing, continuing investigation. And you’ve had my response on that.

Moran’s point is important. Rove, McClellan, Bush, and everyone else has decided the silent treatment is the way out of this mess, but the talking points help prove that Rove is talking, but only to Republican staffers who’ll try to get him out of his mess.

This should infuriate reporters even more. The White House has gone into “lockdown” mode when it comes to journalists and the public, but the message machine rolls on by going around the press and directly to partisan attacks from the RNC. So when McClellan tells the WH press corps, “We can’t talk about an ongoing criminal investigation,” reporters should remember that the denials only apply to them.

They better be careful; the prosecutor may find a low-key way to let the public know that there’s no problem with Rove or the White House discussing the investigation.

They’re relying on Fitzgerald saying nothing, in the same way that they relied on Cooper saying nothing, as they lie. We saw how that worked out.

  • A careful reading of Scotty’s response provides the answer. He clearly said in response to the question that commenting from the podium is what is phrohibited. The reporter should have asked on follow-up if that extended to others in the whitehouse or just Scotty at the podium. When will these whitehouse reporters learn to listen to what was said and ask the appropiate follow-up questions? If someone says they are not a target of an investigation the next question is are you a subject of the investigation not total acceptance of the statement. If someone says they did not disclose a name then the follow-up is did you talk about her in any form with members of the press and can you describe your conversation not just accepting Rove at face value. Time for the media to get a spine and some intelligence.

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