What Did the President Know?
What Did the President Know?:
Now that special prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald is said to have expanded his investigation into the leak of a CIA agent's identity to encompass a possible White House coverup, what the president and the vice president knew would appear to be much more relevant.
Fitzgerald interviewed both President Bush and Vice President Cheney more than a year ago, at what seemed at the time like the tail end of his investigation into the leak of CIA agent Valerie Plame's identity.
Bush and Cheney were not placed under oath -- the reasoning apparently being that they had no direct involvement in the potential criminal activity under investigation: the leak itself. We don't know much about either interview, beyond the fact that Bush had his personal attorney at his side.
But now Fitzgerald's investigation appears to have turned its focus to discrepancies in the testimony of White House senior adviser Karl Rove and vice presidential chief of staff I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby. Fitzgerald may be trying to determine whether evidence exists to bring perjury or obstruction of justice charges.
And that raises the issue of what -- if anything -- Rove and Libby told Bush and Cheney about their roles.
So does that mean Fitzgerald might call Bush and Cheney to testify before the grand jury -- under oath? Might he even have done so already? We have no idea, of course, because the White House isn't saying anything at all about the investigation anymore.
Either way, the CIA leak story is taking on more and more of the trappings of the classic Washington political scandal -- the saving grace for Bush being that his party controls Congress, and that thus far, Republicans have closed ranks behind him.
But get ready for more and more talk about the parallels between this story and the Clinton intern scandal -- and of course, Watergate.
We're already hearing some of the prototypical questions being raised. Here's former presidential adviser David Gergen, on ABC's "This Week" yesterday: "What did the president know and when did he know it?"
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"On CBS's 'Face the Nation' yesterday, Bob Schieffer asked Gonzales about the sequence of events. Here's the transcript.
'SCHIEFFER: Well, let me just ask you the obvious question, Mr. Attorney General. Did you tell anybody at the White House, 'Get ready for this, here it comes'?
'Mr. GONZALES: I told one person in the White House that -- of the notification and...
'SCHIEFFER: Who?
'Mr. GONZALES: ...then immediately -- I told the chief of staff. And then immediately the next morning, I told the president. And shortly thereafter, there was a notification sent out to all the members of the White House staff.'
As Dafna Linzer writes in The Washington Post: 'Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.), appearing on the same program, questioned why Gonzales would not have notified the staff immediately by e-mail and suggested that Fitzgerald pursue whether Card may have given anyone in the White House advance notice of the criminal investigation.
' 'The real question now is, who did the chief of staff speak to? Did the chief of staff pick up the phone and call Karl Rove? Did the chief of staff pick up the phone and call anybody else?' Biden asked.'"
