For about a year, it’s seemed as if White House officials were irritated that chaos and bloodshed in Iraq dominated the news, and prevented them from garnering publicity for other stories they much preferred to talk about.
When it comes to Scooter Libby’s criminal trial, I have a hunch the Bush gang is calling up reporters, asking, “Want to talk about Iraq now?”
Yesterday, Cathie Martin, who was the vice president’s top press aide in 2003 and is now part of the president’s communications team, offered some fascinating testimony about how the White House press operation works and the extent to which Dick Cheney was personally involved in pushing back against Joseph Wilson. Let’s take these one at a time.
First, as Dana Milbank noted, “the trial has already pulled back the curtain on the White House’s PR techniques and confirmed some of the darkest suspicions of the reporters upon whom they are used.”
Memo to Tim Russert: Dick Cheney thinks he controls you.
This delicious morsel about the “Meet the Press” host and the vice president was part of the extensive dish Cathie Martin served up yesterday when the former Cheney communications director took the stand in the perjury trial of former Cheney chief of staff I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby.
Flashed on the courtroom computer screens were her notes from 2004 about how Cheney could respond to allegations that the Bush administration had played fast and loose with evidence of Iraq’s nuclear ambitions. Option 1: “MTP-VP,” she wrote, then listed the pros and cons of a vice presidential appearance on the Sunday show. Under “pro,” she wrote: “control message.”
“I suggested we put the vice president on ‘Meet the Press,’ which was a tactic we often used,” Martin testified. “It’s our best format.”
Martin described quite an operation. Political operators can overrule cabinet secretaries. Information is hidden from spokespeople. Bad news that has to be released is dumped late on Friday afternoons because “fewer people pay attention to it late on Friday,” and “fewer people pay attention when it’s reported on Saturday.”
In other words, the worst assumptions about the vaunted White House communications operation were all true.
As a substantive matter, however, Cheney is the one getting hammered by this week’s revelations.
In the first such account from Vice President Dick Cheney’s inner circle, a former aide testified Thursday that Cheney personally directed the effort to discredit an administration critic by having calls made to reporters in 2003.
Cheney dictated detailed “talking points” for his chief of staff, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, and others on how they could impugn the critic’s credibility, said Catherine J. Martin, who was the vice president’s top press aide at the time.
With regards to the trial, it’s obviously not helpful to have Martin acknowledge that Libby learned about Valerie Plame from Cheney, while Libby claims to have learned it from a reporter. And with regards to the politics, it’s also not helpful to characterize an obsessed Vice President pulling the strings in an overly-aggressive pushback against a White House critic.
Indeed, it’s striking the extent to which Cheney was personally involved. I had imagined the Vice President just offering vague directions to his staff about Wilson and Plame, but Cheney “personally orchestrated his office’s 2003 efforts to rebut allegations,” at one point going so far as to “dictate talking points for a White House briefing.”
And just think, the trial is only in its first week. I can’t wait to see what we’ll learn next….