Of all the major national dailies, only one — the Chicago Tribune — put the Plame story on the front page. Everyone else stuffed it — the Washington Post (page 2), the NY Times (page 16), the LA Times (page 9), and USA Today (page 7). I guess it’s fairly routine to have a sitting president speak to federal investigators as part of a White House criminal investigation. Ho hum.
Since the White House acknowledged yesterday’s “meeting,” we’ve learned a few details.
* Bush was not under oath, but was still required to be honest.
Bush was not questioned under oath, but he did remain under an obligation to testify truthfully and, technically if not practically, he remained liable to be charged with a false statement if prosecutors found he had failed to answer completely or honestly.
* It’s hard to say just how helpful Bush was.
Asked if Bush had answered every question, McClellan said, “The president was glad to do his part to cooperate with the investigation.
* The White House is still cagey about what Bush does or doesn’t know about the crime.
McClellan, who said he was not in the meeting, was asked if Bush had any information about who leaked Plame’s name. “That’s just getting into questions that are best directed to the officials in charge of the investigation,” he said.
* The interview lasted about 70 minutes, but there may have been restrictions on its length.
Asked if the White House had set a time limit, he said it would be “wrong to characterize it that way.”
* We may not be hearing much more about this for a while.
Mr. Fitzgerald, according to some lawyers in the case, is now likely to move into a quiet period of several weeks to weigh the accumulated evidence and consider whether to charge anyone with a crime.
And just as an aside, the Big Dog himself was asked about the Plame Game in an interview with Salon.
“What happened to [Joseph Wilson’s] wife was unforgivable as well as illegal — and potentially dangerous, and damaging to our intelligence networks,” Clinton said. “And it plainly came from someone who didn’t like the fact that Joe didn’t give the accepted line [on Iraq]. So it’s hard for me to believe they can’t find out who outed her. And I would have gone to extraordinary lengths to find that out, and then taken the appropriate steps.”