Dick Stevenson had an item yesterday in the New York Times about the Plame scandal and its impact on the president. Frankly, the principal reason I like these stories is because they put Bush and the criminal investigation in the same breath — instead of just Rove and Libby — but this one touched on something I thought was also interesting.
[I]t is still not clear what the investigation into the leak of a C.I.A. operative’s identity will mean for President Bush. So far the disclosures about the involvement of Karl Rove, among others, have not exacted any substantial political price from the administration. And nobody has suggested that the investigation directly implicates the president.
Yet Mr. Bush has yet to address some uncomfortable questions that he may not be able to evade indefinitely.
For starters, did Mr. Bush know in the fall of 2003, when he was telling the public that no one wanted to get to the bottom of the case more than he did, that Mr. Rove, his longtime strategist and senior adviser, and I. Lewis Libby Jr., Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, had touched on the C.I.A. officer’s identity in conversations with journalists before the officer’s name became public? If not, when did they tell him, and what would the delay say in particular about his relationship with Mr. Rove, whose career and Mr. Bush’s have been intertwined for decades?
Then there is the broader issue of whether Mr. Bush was aware of any effort by his aides to use the C.I.A. officer’s identity to undermine the standing of her husband, a former diplomat who had publicly accused the administration of twisting its prewar intelligence about Iraq’s nuclear program.
Again, at a certain level, there’s some joy in just seeing these questions appear in print. The more reporters start asking the proverbial what-did-he-know, when-did-he-know-it questions, the better.
Still, Stevenson pointed to a fundamental problem for Bush for which there is no easy answer — was the president lying or was he incompetent?
…Bush’s political opponents say the president is in a box. In their view, either Mr. Rove and Mr. Libby kept the president in the dark about their actions, making them appear evasive at a time when Mr. Bush was demanding that his staff cooperate fully with the investigation, or Mr. Rove and Mr. Libby had told the president and he was not forthcoming in his public statements about his knowledge of their roles.
“We know that Karl Rove, through Scott McClellan, did not tell Americans the truth,” said Representative Rahm Emanuel, Democrat of Illinois and a former top aide in the Clinton White House. “What’s important now is what Karl Rove told the president. Was it the truth, or was it what he told Scott McClellan?”
There is a third option, that neither Mr. Rove nor Mr. Libby considered their conversations with the journalists to have amounted to leaking or confirming the information about Ms. Wilson. In that case, they may have felt no need to inform the president, or they did inform him and he shared their view that they had done nothing wrong.
It seems the best outcome, as far as the president is concerned, is the ineptitude defense. His top aides were leaking classified information, but Bush had no idea this was going on around him. (Maybe he was too busy exercising to take much of an interest.) The president said publicly that he wanted to know who was leaking in his West Wing, but he didn’t mean it and never asked anyone on his trusted staff who was responsible for this fiasco. Bush’s best defense, in other words, is to emphasize a complete disconnect between the Oval Office and the actions of the White House. That’ the defense.
But if Rove and others are indicted, even if there’s nothing to directly tie the president to the scandal, how will Bush distance himself from his corrupt staff? How will anyone find it credible if the president disassociates himself from the man best known as “Bush’s brain” and “the architect”?