Washington Post story<\/a> in as many days makes the Wilson\/Plame controversy even more intriguing, raising as many new questions as it answers. The Post reported, for example, that the White House is prepared to “cooperate” with the Justice Department, but would turn over phone logs only if Justice asked the White House to do so.<\/p>\nMoreover, the Post quotes anonymous Bush aides as saying the president “has no plans to ask his staff members whether they played a role” in leaking Plame’s name and CIA status to the media.<\/p>\n
Which naturally leads me to ask, “Why not?”<\/p>\n
Whether you think this story is the biggest scandal since Iran-Contra or just a minor flap that’ll blow over in a couple of days, we know one thing for certain: At least two senior staffers at the White House intentionally leaked classified information to the media.<\/p>\n
Yes, that’s illegal. And yes, it’s a security breach. And yes, it undermines national security.<\/p>\n
Wouldn’t the president and the senior aides not involved with the illegal leaks want to know<\/i> who’s responsible?<\/p>\n
If I’m the president, and I’ve sworn to return “honor and dignity” to the White House, I’d be raising hell until I knew exactly who on my staff was responsible for this. Even assuming no one was willing to fess up voluntarily, phone logs could determine quickly if, say, Karl Rove made a bunch of phone calls to Bob Novak a couple of days before July 14.<\/p>\n
In fact, Bush would have more credibility with his critics (including me) if he demonstrated a little anger about this mess. If he showed some leadership, said he was outraged, and promised to get to the bottom of this immediately, I’d be far more inclined to believe he could limit the political fallout of the controversy.<\/p>\n
The White House is doing the opposite. Instead of leadership, the Bush White House is giving us on-the-record silence and passive disinterest in who was responsible. Apparently they believe closing their eyes and hoping this will go away makes for an appropriate response. I think this could end up making the scandal even worse.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The second front-page Washington Post story in as many days makes the Wilson\/Plame controversy even more intriguing, raising as many new questions as it answers. The Post reported, for example, that the White House is prepared to “cooperate” with the Justice Department, but would turn over phone logs only if Justice asked the White House […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-686","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/686","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=686"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/686\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=686"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=686"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=686"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}