It was supposed to be a forum for former White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan to dish Karl Rove, or maybe Vice President Dick Cheney in the leaking of CIA operative Valerie Plame's identity.
But in the opening moments of today's House Judiciary Committee hearings, McClellan got slammed by Republican Lamar Smith of Texas, who questioned whether McClellan's book was actually written by his editor, Karl Weber, who, he said, has called President Bush "a clearly horrible person."
Public Affairs, which published McClellan's book "What Happened," said the comment came not from Weber but from his daughter.
Smith also suggested McClellan wrote the book to 1) make money and 2) get back at those in the White House who fired him. "While we may never know the answers, Scott McClellan alone will have to wrestle with whether it was worth selling out the president and his friends for a few pieces of silver."
Jerrold Nadler, a New York Democrat, defended McClellan, saying "character assassination" has no place in the Judiciary Committee.
Then the committee recessed, so members could go vote on a wiretapping law. When they get back you can watch the hearing here or follow updates at latimes.com here.
They are probably the last Medals of Freedom President Bush will award -- and some conservatives are upset he did not use the opportunity to honor more Republican heroes.
To be sure, there was veteran federal judge Laurence H. Silberman, whose controversial role in national security issues has made him a champion to conservatives, and retired Marine Gen. Peter Pace, who was denied a second term as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and reviled by gay groups for his opposition to gays in the military.
Bush also elected to give the honor to recipients whose place in history no one could dispute -- doctors Anthony S. Fauci, a leader in the understanding and treatment of HIV/AIDS, and Benjamin S. Carson, a renowned neurosurgeon, along with, posthumously, Rep. Tom Lantos (D-Burlingame), the only Holocaust survivor to serve in Congress and a longtime leader on human rights issues.
But the one that set conservative tongues wagging was educator Donna E. Shalala, president of the University of Miami and secretary of Health and Human Services in the Clinton administration.
"I have no great brief against Donna Shalala, Sec'y of HHS in the Clinton administration, but a Medal of Freedom? " wrote Andrew McCarthy in a post on National Review's Corner last week. Given the likelihood of a Democratic victory in November, he continued, "now may be the last time a Republican gets to grant this honor to deserving recipients for a very long time. And this is how the president chooses to use his opportunity?"
After looking up the list of recipients, he noted, "Judge Robert Bork, now 81, has never gotten one. Wouldn't that have been nice?"
NBC's Tim Russert was known for grilling guests on NBC's "Meet the Press" without regard to party affiliation or standing in the polls. During the Bush administration, every major Cabinet official was on the show and some -- like Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice -- were frequent guests.
At today's memorial service at the Kennedy Center, which Rice attended, historian Doris Kearns Goodwin said the show will be invaluable to future historians. "They will not only be able to read" the transcripts, she said, but watch the video and judge the character of the officials who responded.
She said Russert always marveled that political figures of the day hated to acknowledge -- even after seeing his exhumed quotes of things they had said in the past -- that they had changed their minds. And she relayed a story about Abraham Lincoln, one of her recent subjects, saying that he always explained he'd changed his mind with the comment that he hoped he was smarter today than he had been yesterday.
Scott McClellan, whose bombshell kiss-and-tell kept Washington buzzing two weeks ago, will have his chance to implicate his former White House colleagues for their role in the leaking of Valerie Plame's identity as a CIA operative.
Invited to testify on Capitol Hill on June 20, McClellan could produce fireworks in advance of the July Fourth holiday. The testimony could also have legal consequences beyond the sentence already meted out to the vice president's former chief of staff I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, the one commuted by President Bush.
As Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers (D-Mich.) explained, “In his book, Mr. McClellan suggests that senior White House officials may have obstructed justice and engaged in a cover-up regarding the Valerie Plame leak. This alleged activity could well extend beyond the scope of the offenses for which Scooter Libby has been convicted and deserves further attention.”
Vice President Dick Cheney is apologizing for a joke he made about West Virginia.
Cheney and his Press Club Moment
“We had Cheneys on both sides of the family — and we don’t even live in West Virginia," he told a National Press Club audience in responding to news that he was a distant relative of Barack Obama. "You can say these things when you’re not running for re-election.”
Maybe not.
Gov. Joe Manchin reminded Cheney that West Virginia "is home to some of the most patriotic people in the nation and our sons and daughters have answered the call to duty every time a president has needed their service."
So the vice president's office quickly issued the usual apology -- "not meant to hurt anyone...inappropriate attempt at humor ''
The curious thing is that Obama has been using the news of their tenuous kinship for months on the campaign trail to great effect, always bringing a laugh from Democratic audiences when he says the news that they were distant cousins on a genealogical chart was "a little embarrassing."
When President Bush was popular and his remaining time in office long, congressional Republicans were quick to jump to his defense. Now, with his approval ratings in the tank and his remaining term measured in months, they are hugging to their seats.
When former White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan's book came out, their was silence from the president's putative Republican allies. OK, so Congress is in recess. But when Bush was popular, GOP lawmakers would rush to TV studios and send out mass e-mails to defend the president, even if they were on remote Pacific islands.
Democrats, of course, are ready to pounce. Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.), chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, said he has instructed his staff to begin discussions with McClellan to determine whether the committee should hold a hearing on revelations in the book about attempts to cover-up the Valerie Plame leak.
Finally, a Republican piped up. Rep. Lamar Smith of Texas, the panel's top Republican, said: “While I’m sure Mr. McClellan's publishers would want nothing more than some free publicity from Judiciary Committee Democrats, we have more important things to do on this committee than investigate the unfounded allegations of a disgruntled former employee. This is a book about personal opinions, not facts. And it's no surprise that the liberal publisher has chosen to promote outrageous statements as part of a political smear campaign to grab headlines and sell books. It should not take a congressional hearing to determine that Mr. McClellan's statements are not credible.”
Sometimes, it seems, every former Justice Department official is making millions monitoring corporate wrongdoers. Even Atty. Gen. Michael B. Mukasey almost punched his ticket on the gravy train.
The practice of companies paying ex-government lawyers a bundle to act as in-house watchdogs has been making news since the fall when it was disclosed that former AG John Ashcroft stood to make up to $58 million under a deal with an Indiana medical supply company.
The Justice Department has argued that such deals, made as part of deferred prosecution agreements, help ensure that companies comply with the law without the costs and hassles of litigation.
Members of Congress say the lucrative agreements, the details of which are usually kept secret, are prone to abuse. They also say that corporations - unlike individual citizens - should not be able to buy their way out of trouble with Uncle Sam.
Responding to the furor, the Justice Department, under Mukasey, issued new guidelines in March that aim to tighten up the process for selecting the monitors.
But it turns out that the pull of such sweet deals was even irresistible for the soon-to-be attorney general. Mukasey acknowledged recently that he had applied to become a corporate monitor for British Petroleum Co. before he was named to succeed Alberto R. Gonzales last November. The firm was being investigated by the Justice Department on a host of fronts including accusations that it had attempted to illegally corner the market on propane.
Mukasey - a federal judge who left the bench to make real money as a senior partner at a New York law firm - said he approached BP officials in Chicago about the job.
“I auditioned for that,” he told a small group of reporters recently. (He volunteered the information after being asked another question about BP.)
BP selected someone else--a lawyer who used to work with Mukasey in the U.S. attorney's office in Manhattan. But there appear to be no hard feelings.
Mukasey said he was told by career lawyers at the department that they had not signed off on selecting the monitor for BP before Mukasey had to withdraw from the competition because of his new gig in Washington.
“In fact, amusingly, I met with some of the people in the fraud section after I came here,” he recounted. The lawyers - apparently uninterested in alienating their new boss - “assured me that the selection process hadn’t been completed,” the attorney general said.
Unclear what the BP job would have paid. But the company has said in a press release that the total cost of fines, penalties and compensation to settle the matter was about $300 million.
Bush loyalists, outraged by Scott McClellan's disloyalty, are taking comfort from the inevitable fallout. Scott's newfound friends on the left, they muse, will drop him as soon as it's convenient. And while his book may earn him a lot of money, he'll never work in Washington political circles again.
Maybe, but if history is any guide, he may find safe haven in New York financial or media circuits instead.
Remember George Stephanopoulos? In 1999 he wrote "All Too Human," an insider tell-all about Bill and Hillary Clinton. These days he's anchor of ABC's "This Week" Sunday talk show.
Then there was David Stockman's "The Triumph of Politics: Why the Reagan Revolution Failed." President Reagan took his OMB director to the "woodshed" over the book (maybe the title?) but afterwards Stockman had a nice run on Wall Street. (Until recently when he was indicted in a fraud case.)
And of course there's Dick Morris, who wrote "Behind the Oval Office" about his efforts to teach Clinton how to triangulate. After a brief period of censure for having a long-term relationship with a prostitute, Morris was back on the lecture circuit, practically making a living off analyzing the Clintons.
So if dissing a president doesn't destroy a career, if there's no downside to disclosure, what's a White House to do? Loyalty oaths sort of went out with the Joe McCarthy witch hunt era. As for civility well, let's not even go there. I thought Tim Russert put it nicely the other morning on the Today Show when he said, "Beware of the quiet guy standing in the corner of the room."
When Mike Allen of the Politico broke the story of Scott McClellan's new kiss-and-tell book Tuesday night, he explained that he just happened to spot the epistle while browsing at a local bookstore.
Then reporters for other newspapers, who already had the book, began dishing from its pages. Some of them explained that they too just happened to spot it on the shelves.
So remarkable was the coincidence that Neal Conan, on NPR's "Talk of the Nation" Wednesday, asked Louise Radnofsky of the Wall Street Journal when she had acquired the book.
CONAN: When did you actually get a copy of this book?
Ms. RADNOFSKY: Late last night. I was on my way home.
CONAN: And you just happened to see it in a bookstore?
Ms. RADNOFSKY: Yes, on sale in a Washington bookstore.
Ms. Radnofsky emailed me that she actually did see the book in a local shop, and has the receipt to prove it.
But let's cut to the chase here. We are living in an era when book publishers make deals with news organizations to control the media rollout for a hot book. They give you an advance copy so you can actually read the tome, but dictate when you can write about it. Reporters who get itchy for a scoop and decide to break the embargo? Yes, you got it, they saw it on the shelves at the local bookshop!
Maybe Mike Allen did, as he said, just happen upon it. For the rest of us, enough of the hypocrisy. End the shellgame. Please, my colleagues, come clean. Otherwise you'll have to endure more embarassing moments like this one, when NPR's Conan sounded a note of incredulity over the whole affair.
CONAN: Louise Radnofsky, you and reporters for the New York Times, the Washington Post and Politico, the website, all happen to come across it in bookstores here in Washington last night?
Ms. RADNOFSKY: I didn't know if it was the same bookstore, but yes.
James Gerstenzang and Johanna Neuman are reporters in The Times' Washington bureau. Between the two of them, they have covered the White House, diplomacy, military affairs, the environment, international economics, trade and Congress. They have both spent time in Crawford, Texas.
They are probably the last 
