Memo Madness

Further to my comments below, it's looking increasingly likely that the State Department Memos on board a White House flight to Africa are the original sources - or close to it - for the Plame identity leak. All of which casts the spotlight on the guy who used to do the Scott McLellan talk show (till he was laughed out of the room), Ari Fleischer.

Josh Marshall looks at two reports of the memo - one from the Times and one from Bloomberg - and asks:

"Does an assistant secretary of State send a document to the White House if he's trying to send it to the Secretary? Even if the Secretary is about to leave on a foreign trip with the president? Perhaps that's how it would be done. I don't know.

Secondly, where at State did the first memo originate [Bolton?]? Bloomberg seems clear that the second memo was prepared at INR, State's in-house intel bureau. But they're less clear on whether the first one came from there.

It's certainly possible that the difference between these two memos is little more than the difference between xeroxing it or slapping another date at the top. But as long as we're all blind men feeling one part of the elephant, let's try to cover as much of the animal as possible."

And Newseek today has a great cover story by Howard Fineman, brilliantly profiling Karl Rove's amoral "genius" and carefully re-creating the scene aboard that Air Force One flight. In the process, he drags another figure, Dan Bartlett, into the picture:

Technically, Rove was in charge of politics, not "communications." But, as he saw it, the two were one and the same — and he used his heavyweight status to push the message machine run by his Texas protegé and friend, Dan Bartlett. Press Secretary Ari Fleischer was sent out to trash the Wilson op-ed. "Zero, nada, nothing new here," he said. Then, on a long Bush trip to Africa, Fleischer and Bartlett prompted clusters of reporters to look into the bureaucratic origins of the Wilson trip...

There's also a thoughful aside, suggesting where people like Karl Rove come from in today's USA:

His dad walked out in 1969; in 1970, he learned that he and a brother had been fathered by someone other than the man he had called Dad. (Eleven years later, his mother committed suicide.)

Don't cry for me, Alabama...