GONZALES COMES OUT
After what is expected to be Attorney General Alberto
Gonzales’s coming out party on Monday, look for the media
focus to turn to the House and Senate as the primary possible
sources for the leaked NSA overseas monitoring program.
Gonzales is expected to testify before the Senate Judiciary
Committee and make perhaps his most aggressive testimony since
moving over to become Attorney General a year or so ago. In
testimony that is being leaked to various outlets, Gonzales will
push back hard against the likes of (unnamed) Democratic National
Committee Chairman Howard Dean, Sens. Jay
Rockefeller, Dick Durbin, Patrick
Leahy and Ted Kennedy, all of whom have
attempted to make political hay of a program that has been
determined to be legal, and which was detailed to both Republican
and Democrat Senators and House members as required by law.
If Gonzales’s appearance before the Judiciary Committee
accomplishes anything, the Bush Administration is hopeful it will
refocus media attention on exactly who it was that made perhaps the
most damaging leak of national security activity in more than 30
years.
“The problem is because it’s classified, we can’t detail just
how damaging the NSA leaks have been,” says a career Department of
Justice attorney. “But they were, and the American public needs to
understand what is at stake here.”
According to other DOJ and FBI sources, the investigation into
the leak has been focused on Capitol Hill, where a number of
interviews have already taken place. In fact, the FBI is still
considering asking the members of the Senate Intelligence Committee
and its staff to sign blanket waivers and releases that would allow
a full investigation and disclosure of their interactions with
reporters and others who might have used the NSA’s activities for
political purposes.
“There is no question that people are going to be looking at
us,” says a Senate Democratic Party leadership aide. “Never mind
that it might be a Republican with a conscience who leaked it.
People are going to assume that it was a Democratic staffer who did
it for his or her boss, or that it was the Senator himself. The
fact that in this case people assume that it was a Democrat shows
how far we’ve slipped in the minds of the American public. That’s
our problem, and we can’t really blame the Republicans.”
RUN, RYUN, RUN
There is much talk that Rep. Jim Ryun of Kansas
was the unwitting tool of supporters of Rep. John
Boehner in the election last week to replace Republican
House Leader Tom DeLay. Recall that on the first
ballot, Rep. Roy Blunt — the early favorite to
unseat replace DeLay — garnered 110 votes to
Boehner’s 79, Shadegg’s 40, and two write-in votes for Ryun. But
Ryun’s write-in was part of a closely held strategy by the Boehner
and Shadegg camps to ensure that Shadegg remained a viable option
going into the second round. According to one House member, the
word is that one Boehner supporter and one Shadegg supporter each
wrote in Ryun’s name on the first ballot.
Because the lowest vote-getter gets lopped off for the next
round, Ryun was dropped and Shadegg, who was expected to be the
third and only vote-getter, lived to fight on another ballot.
Shadegg’s initial presence allowed for a further softening of
Blunt’s support for the second round, before Shadegg himself pulled
out and allowed his support to go entirely to Boehner. Boehner beat
Blunt on the second ballot, 122-109.
According to members of Boehner’s kitchen cabinet of advisers,
who have met regularly for months to map out his return to
leadership of the conference, Boehner’s whip operation canvassed
those members who had publicly endorsed Blunt early in the
process.
“What became clear is that Blunt’s support was strong on the
first ballot, but after that, all bets were off, and we had an
opportunity,” says one of Boehner’s advisers. “We heard from at
least 20 members who had endorsed Blunt that it was only a promise
of first round support. We didn’t push these members too hard; we
didn’t want Blunt’s people identifying our strategy. We wanted them
to think they had a count on the second ballot that we knew they
simply did not have.”
In the end, the rap on Blunt — that he wasn’t as smart a whip
counter as his predecessor, DeLay — came back to haunt him
again.
WHIPPED INTO SHAPE
There remains talk that Rep. Roy Blunt is not long
for the House Whip post, though his exit might not occur until
after the 2006 election. Look for some shakeup in Blunt’s deputy
whip contingent in the short-term. It’s expected that both newly
elected House Majority Leader John Boehner and
members of the Republican House Study Committee will have a say in
who steps into some of those positions for this session of the
House.
The talk of changes took on greater volume after Boehner and
Blunt held a long, private meeting — no staff allowed — in
Blunt’s Capitol office on Friday morning. Blunt, according to a
leadership staffer, did not reveal what was discussed.
Boehner’s staff is already mulling just what he needs to do to
cement his position over the next eight months moving toward
election day in November. “We want him to be solid as leader, with
no risk of challenges by the old guard,” says a Boehner staffer.
“We want him to be leader for some time. He’ll take care of working
with the White House on the policies that will help that. We’ll
focus on the politics of the conference.”
