Who Would Have Guessed?

Boy, the latest from the Scooter Libby perjury case really hit like a bombshell, didn't it? The fact that he claimed the Prez gave permission for the leak had to have come as a surprise to everybody, didn't it? Didn't it? Does this mean Bush wasn't entirely straightforward when he claimed anyone found leaking in his administration would be dealt with accordingly?

The whole thing is just looking more and more like Watergate. Karl Rove has been implicated for a while (though he has yet to be charged with any crime), and it was a fairly safe assumption that if he was aware of what was going on, so was Bush. I never got around to linking to it, but Murray Waas laid all this out last week in the National Journal. His main focus was on a memo Bush had seen summarizing the doubts the state and energy departments had about the aluminum tubes Saddam had imported that the White House claimed could only have been used for developing nuclear weapons. Bush saw this memo before he made the tubes a cornerstone of his case for invading Iraq. We've since learned that the state and energy departments were correct and the tubes had nothing whatsoever to do with weapons of mass destruction. Oops. According to Waas, the White House wanted to protect the Prez and keep him insulated from the charge that he knew the tubes weren't dangerous when he made the claim. Valerie Plame was just collateral damage. (Yesterday, Atrios pointed us to a write-up Greg Sargent put together for The American Prospect Online that serves as a sort of Cliffs Notes of the longer Waas piece.)

This obviously opens up a potential Pandora's box for the White House. The Republican Senate has so far shown virtually no interest in investigating the intelligence that led us into war, but this may tip their hand and force them into it. Or, the way things seem to go in Washington these days, not.