Live by spin, die by spin, writes Howard Fineman:

...In essence, the Bush-Rove campaign machine was redeployed in the service of selling of the Iraq war and, later, in defense of that sale. Did they go over the line in doing so? We’re about to find out.

In the meantime (and in another twist on the poetic justice them), the very discipline of the machine itself—its short internal supply lines, the consistently-followed talking points, the focus on feeding friends and obliterating enemies—could be helping Fitzgerald. Tightly-knit groups rise together, but they fall together. If the inner circle is small, it takes only one insider “flip” to endanger the rest.

The campaign sales structure for the political run up to the war was clear from the start. White House Chief of Staff Andy Card talked openly about new-car style “rollouts” in the fall of 2002; it soon became well-known that, among those in the so called “White House Iraq Group”—WHIG for short—were campaign honchos such as Rove, Karen Hughes, Ari Fleischer and Mary Matalin.

People have long since gotten used to the idea of Rove in the White House. But, the fact is, in 2001, his presence was something novel. He was the first modern-era consultant with an office in the West Wing.

And there he was in the WHIG, along with several of the heaviest hitters of substantive foreign policy, including Vice Presidential Chief of Staff I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, then-National Security Advisor Condi Rice and her deputy, Steve Hadley.

What, if any, classified information was floating around at WHIG meetings? What, if any, of it was “put out,” as they say, or used in other ways? What, if any, info might some of the more enthusiastic WHIG members have tried to cadge on the side, perhaps for their own somewhat freelance use? Who leaked what to whom among the Judy Miller types in the national media?

These questions were not asked for the most part at the time, either by the media or the Democrats who now oppose the war. But in American politics we tend to replay every cataclysmic political issue in the courts: Nixon’s reelection in 1972 in Watergate, Clinton’s in 1996 in Monica Madness.

Now comes—again—the war in Iraq and, by extension, the reelection of the self-described “war president.”

Will Fitzgerald indict anyone? Well-placed insiders, including two I’ve talked to in the last two days, think that he will. And then the gods, or rather the law, will begin to speak.

Posted by Laura at October 19, 2005 02:41 PM