WASHINGTON, Oct. 23 - With a decision expected this week on possible indictments in the C.I.A. leak case, allies of the White House suggested Sunday that they intended to pursue a strategy of attacking any criminal charges as a disagreement over legal technicalities or the product of an overzealous prosecutor.
So the White House PR spin machine has been working overtime. Of course, the Sunday morning talk programs was just one way for the PR machine to spin their own tale. We'll start with Kay Bailey Hutchinson:
On Sunday, Republicans appeared to be preparing to blunt the impact of any charges. Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, Republican of Texas, speaking on the NBC news program "Meet the Press," compared the leak investigation with the case of Martha Stewart and her stock sale, "where they couldn't find a crime and they indict on something that she said about something that wasn't a crime."
Ms. Hutchison said she hoped "that if there is going to be an indictment that says something happened, that it is an indictment on a crime and not some perjury technicality where they couldn't indict on the crime and so they go to something just to show that their two years of investigation was not a waste of time and taxpayer dollars."
I love this quote. It is such an absurd circular logic that is amazing. So KBH is worried as to whether Fitzgerald is going to hand down an indictment of a crime, or will it be an indictment of a perjury technicality, when Fitzgerald couldn't indict on a crime or waste time and money on an investigation that went nowhere. Gee...Doesn't that sound like Bill Clinton's own indictments for having an extramarital affair, issued by right-wingnut Ken Starr who was originally meant to investigate an Arkansas land deal called Whitewater, wasted taxpayers time and money while not finding anything criminal against the Clintons in this Whitewater deal? The fun goes on:
But allies of the White House have quietly been circulating talking points in recent days among Republicans sympathetic to the administration, seeking to help them make the case that bringing charges like perjury mean the prosecutor does not have a strong case, one Republican with close ties to the White House said Sunday. Other people sympathetic to Mr. Rove and Mr. Libby have said that indicting them would amount to criminalizing politics and that Mr. Fitzgerald did not understand how Washington works.
Some Republicans have also been reprising a theme that was often sounded by Democrats during the investigations into President Bill Clinton, that special prosecutors and independent counsels lack accountability and too often pursue cases until they find someone to charge.
Congressional Republicans have also been signaling that they want to put some distance between their agenda and the White House's potential legal and political woes, seeking to cast the leak case as an inside-the-Beltway phenomenon of little interest to most voters.
"I think we just need to stick to our knitting on the topics and the subjects the American people care about," Senator Sam Brownback, Republican of Kansas, said on "Fox News Sunday."
So Mr. Brownback...What subjects should the American people care about? The badly mismanaged Iraq war? The upcoming high energy prices for this winter? The disastrous FEMA aid and reconstruction programs coming after Katrina and Rita? And who knows what will happen as Wilma strikes the Florida coast? So we should just forget about Valerie Plame, and the fact that the Bush administration lied to the American people, then tried to silence criticism through illegally outing a CIA agent.
The case, which traces back to an effort by the White House to rebut criticism of its use of intelligence to justify the invasion of Iraq, has grown into a crisis for the administration that has the potential to shape the remainder of Mr. Bush's second term. Democrats signaled Sunday that they would use the inquiry to help weave a broader tapestry portraying the Republican Party as corrupt and the White House as dishonest with the American people.
"We know that the president wasn't truthful with us when he sent us to Iraq," Howard Dean, the chairman of the Democratic National Committee, said on "This Week" on ABC. "What got Rove and Libby in trouble was because they were attacking, which the Republicans always do, attacking somebody who criticized them and disagreed with them. They make the attacks personal. They go over the line."
The Republicans made the attacks personal. That is the main problem with the Bush White House. And Rove, Libby, Cheney, and maybe even the president himself thought they could be above the law, in getting away with these attacks. Well, they couldn't get away with it this time, and it will almost be difficult for the Bush spin-meisters to talk their way out of this fiasco. Continuing on:
[Fitzgerald's] silence has left much of official Washington and nearly everyone who works at or with the White House in a state of high anxiety. That has been compounded by the widespread belief that there are aspects of the case beyond those directly involving Mr. Rove and Mr. Libby that remain all but unknown outside of Mr. Fitzgerald's office. Among them is the mystery of who first provided the C.I.A. officer's identity to the syndicated columnist Robert D. Novak, who published it on July 14, 2003.
The negative effects on Mr. Bush's presidency if his senior aides were indicted, said James A. Thurber, director of the Center for Congressional and Presidential Studies at American University in Washington, would be as great as the positive effects of Mr. Bush's handling of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
"This is the most important turning point for his administration in terms of turning down and losing support," Mr. Thurber said.
A weakened White House, he said, could lead to further infighting among the conservatives who provide most of Mr. Bush's legislative, grass-roots and financial support, and could leave the administration with even less political clout to sway Democrats in Republican-leaning states to back Mr. Bush's agenda.
Republicans acknowledged the problems facing the White House but said Mr. Bush would ultimately be judged on whether he produced results in addressing the issues of most concern to the American people.
We'll just have to wait and see when the indictments are handed out.
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