At today’s press briefing, Scott McClellan was asked to explain why Attorney General Alberto Gonzales was willing to speak openly about his role in the Plame investigation yesterday on CBS’s Face the Nation:

QUESTION: I know that none of you are speaking about this because it’s an ongoing investigation. Can you explain why Alberto Gonzales would go on TV yesterday and do that and talk about it?

MCCLELLAN: Well, what he said was already said from this podium back in October of 2003, and I don’t think he got into commenting in any substantive way on the discussion.

This is a very different standard than the one he has operated under for the past three weeks. Until now, McClellan has refused to answer many of the very same questions he responded to freely in the past. Take this exchange, from 7/11/05:

QUESTION: Does the President stand by his pledge to fire anyone involved in the leak of a name of a CIA operative?

MR. McCLELLAN: Terry, I appreciate your question. I think your question is being asked relating to some reports that are in reference to an ongoing criminal investigation. … And as I’ve previously stated, while that investigation is ongoing, the White House is not going to comment on it.

But now McClellan says that administration officials can repeat previous claims while still honoring the special prosecutor’s request not to speak about the case. As such, White House reporters should ask him to repeat or confirm his previous assertions about the Plame investigation, such as:

- There’s been nothing, absolutely nothing, brought to our attention to suggest any White House involvement, and that includes the vice president’s office as well. [link]

- If anyone in this administration was involved in [leaking classified information], they would no longer be in this administration. [link]

- “The President knows” that Karl Rove wasn’t involved. [link]

McClellan created the standard. The only question is whether the press corps will make him stick to it.

Yesterday, White House adviser to the Supreme Court nomination process, former Sen. Fred Thompson, said the White House is likely to refuse requests from the Senate Judiciary Committee to review memoranda that Roberts drafted while he worked in the Reagan and Bush I administrations.

The White House can’t blame critics who think they’re hiding something. The Bush administration chose to hide the following information:

- The PDB from the 9/11 Commission
- Documents related to the leak investigation
- Cheney’s influence in Halliburton deal
- Cheney’s Energy Task Force deliberations
- The true cost of the Medicare bill
- John Bolton’s secret intercepts
- Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse report

Historical experience dictates the lesson to be learned is that when the White House has something they refuse to disclose, there’s bad news to be found:

Presidential Daily Brief

What They Hid:

There was a “contentious battle between the September 11 panel and the White House over access to the President’s Daily Briefs or PDBs–the intelligence briefing report that is given to the president every morning.”

What We Learned:

Bush received PDB prior to 9-11 entitled “Bin Laden determined to strike in US“

Read more

Conservatives have gone on attack against anyone trying to put together the puzzle pieces to figure out John Roberts’ ambiguous stance on reproductive rights. The major talking points are:

Opposition to Roberts is opposition to those of faith:

Opponents will undoubtedly argue that Roberts is hostile to abortion rights based on a pair of briefs on which Roberts appeared while Deputy SG The unspoken undercurrent of these charges, and the likely basis for a whispering campaign against Roberts, is that he is a practicing Catholic and therefore predisposed to advancing the social policies of the Catholic Church through judicial opinions.

The anti-abortion stance of Roberts’ wife should not reflect on Roberts:

My wife has opinions on things that may or may conform with mine and I think most couples are in that situation.

Rush Limbaugh jumped into the argument:

Jennifer Palmieri, a spokeswoman for the Center for American Progress, which is, it’s a lib group, it actually should be called the Center for American Regression. “It’s unclear how all of this will affect her husband,” said Jennifer Palmieri. “It’s just that in the absence of information about this guy, people are looking at her, trying to read some tea leaves.”…But the bottom line here is, folks, that you have wholesome family right, cut right from the mainstream, and the heartland of this country and that is invoking fear, palpable fear in the minds and hearts of the American left and it’s just pathetic.

Not matter what Karl Rove says, an individual’s wife should not be “fair game” nor should religious belief be used to prejudice against someone. The problem is that it is actually conservatives who originally set up both Roberts’ faith and his wife as a way to judge which way he will vote on key social issues:

When the White House began testing the name of Judge Roberts on a short list of potential nominees, many social conservatives were skeptical…Judge Roberts’s family life and religious convictions helped sell him to Christian conservatives as well. Both he and his wife, Jane Sullivan Roberts, were observant Catholics, Mr. [Leonard] Leo [chairman of Catholic outreach for the Republican Party] told other allies…“For people like me who are reading the tea leaves, it is another marker that we can breathe easy,” said Austin Ruse, president of the Culture of Life Foundation, a conservative Catholic group.

For the past month, multiple news organizations have been reporting that Supreme Court nominee John Roberts was a member of the Federalist Society, a conservative legal organization. The White House denied the reports last week, and media outlets, including the AP and the Washington Post, were forced to issue retractions.

Now the Washington Post reports that, indeed, Roberts was a member of the Federalist Society according to a published copy of a organization’s 1997-1998 leadership directory. Not only was he a member, but according to the document, he was a member of the steering committee of the organization’s Washington chapter. The White House’s initial response was that Roberts “has no recollection of being a member of the Federalist Society, or its steering committee.” And today, when Roberts was directly “asked by a reporter about the discrepancy,” the nominee “smiled but didn’t reply.” So something like this…

Unfortunately, Roberts’ non-response wasn’t nearly as bad as the White House’s admission that they would have lied about his membership anyway:

Last Wednesday, the day after Bush announced Roberts’s nomination, the officials working on the nomination asked the White House press office to call each news organization that had reported Roberts’s membership to tell them that he did not recall being a member. Asked yesterday if the White House would have done so knowing about the leadership directory, Perino said “Yes.”

Alberto Gonzales argues that the 12-hour head start he gave to Andrew Card before he instructed the White House staff to preserve documents related to Plame leak was appropriate because he got permission from the Department of Justice. According to Gonzales, he contacted the Department of Justice about it and was told: “Go ahead and notify the staff early in the morning. That would be OK.”

Bob Schieffer noted yesterday that the 12-hour window gave “people time to shred documents and do any number of things.”

Remember: at the time, the investigation was controlled by former Attorney General John Ashcroft. Karl Rove “worked for Ashcroft over the course of two decades.” After Ashcroft lost his Senate seat in 2000 Rove “lobbied intensely for his former employer’s nomination” to Attorney General.

In December 2003, Ashcroft recused himself from the investigation amidst criticism that his close ties to Rove and others in the White House created a conflict of interest.