October 28, 2005

Announcer: From our nation's capital this is WASHINGTON WEEK. And now here's moderator Gwen Ifill.

GWEN IFILL, host: Indictments, collapsed nominations, the 2,000th US casualty mark: dark clouds over the Bush presidency.

Out of control: The famously organized Bush White House was knocked seriously off course this week by a special prosecutor who indicted Dick Cheney aide Lewis "Scooter" Libby on five counts of allegedly lying to the FBI and to a federal grand jury...

Mr. PATRICK FITZGERALD (Special Prosecutor): Anyone who would go into a grand jury and lie, obstruct, impede the investigation has committed a serious crime.

IFILL: ...by a conservative uprising that derailed the president's Supreme Court nominee...

Tom Perkin (Prseident, Family Research Council): Mr. President, we're with you. We want to support you. We want to help you. But you cannot take us to a place that we, through our conviction, cannot go.

IFILL: ...and by a general sense that less than one year into his second term, President Bush has now become a wounded and lame duck.

President GEORGE W. BUSH: Thanks for the chance to get out of Washington.

IFILL: Tonight we examine the White House at a crossroads legally, politically and perilously with Michael Duffy of Time magazine, Pete Williams of NBC News, Jeanne Cummings of The Wall Street Journal and Todd Purdum of The New York Times.

Announcer: Here again is moderator Gwen Ifill.

IFILL: Good evening.

Analysis: Indictment of Lewis Libby in CIA case

GWEN IFILL, host: Between today's indictment and yesterday's Supreme Court implosion, this was a week for the history books with its echoes of Watergate and Vietnam and White House shakeups. Special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald did not indict for the crime he was originally hired to investigate: Who leaked the name of a covert CIA agent? But he stressed today that perjury and obstruction of justice are not to be taken lightly either.

Mr. PATRICK FITZGERALD (Justice Department Special Prosecutor): If it is proven that the chief of staff of the vice president went before a federal grand jury and lied under oath repeatedly and fabricated a story about how he learned this information, how he passed it on and we prove obstruction of justice, perjury and false statements to the FBI, that is a very, very serious matter.

IFILL: It's been more than a century since a sitting White House official was indicted for anything. So the resignation of Lewis "Scooter" Libby today knocked Washington askew. And as always seems to be the case, the alleged crime was the cover-up, wasn't it, Michael?

Mr. MICHAEL DUFFY (Time Magazine, Assistant Managing Editor): Well, that seems to be the case, at least so far. The interesting thing, I think, that Fitzgerald explained at the beginning when he said we're not going after the 1982 law that made it a crime to reveal a CIA officer's identity--he used an interesting October metaphor. He said--he essentially charged Libby with throwing so much sand in the umpire's face that it made it impossible for him to make that call. And so he slapped him with five counts, two of false statements, two of perjury and one of obstruction of justice.

Now at the heart of his case is essentially a road map that puts in place a bunch of pieces we'd sort of felt and seen and glimpsed but never had all in one place, and it essentially says that while Libby told federal investigators that he'd learned about Valerie Plame, the CIA officer's identity, from reporters, there isn't much evidence of that. In fact, the evidence that Fitzgerald put on the table today showed that Libby went out and sought the information about Wilson--Joe Wilson's mission to Niger--that's Plame's husband--discussed that with officials in the White House about how to disseminate it, and also learned about the identity from three other intelligence officers--or--one including the vice president. So he basically said that Libby's story just doesn't stack up against the evidence.

IFILL: Pete, one of the--you've been covering this story. You were at that news conference today. One of the things we were hearing for weeks leading up to this was that Karl Rove was going to be a main target of any indictments that came out. That did not happen today.

Mr. PETE WILLIAMS (NBC News, Justice Correspondent): No.

IFILL: We don't know that it's going to happen.

Mr. WILLIAMS: No, and there was a suggestion from some of the legal insiders that are following this case that maybe Karl Rove still has a cloud over him. The investigation still isn't officially ended. I personally am inclined not to think that that's the case. This investigation is over in all but a formal way, and it seems very unlikely now that Karl Rove would face any charges. This was the day for Patrick Fitzgerald to put his cards on the table. There may be some loose ends to wrap up, but it doesn't seem likely that Karl Rove will be charged with anything.

IFILL: Let's look at something that he had to say today. One of the things that was curious--because people wanted to know why was he indicting on perjury and obstruction of justice and not on the central question of whether someone actually leaked a covert spy's name--and he talked about what his duty was. Let's listen to that.

Mr. PATRICK FITZGERALD (Special Prosecutor): That's the way this investigation was conducted. It was known that a CIA officer's identity was blown. It was known that there was a leak. We needed to figure out how that happened, who did it, why, whether a crime was committed, whether we could prove it, whether we should prove it. And given that national security was at stake, it was especially important that we find out accurate facts.

IFILL: Jeanne.

Ms. JEANNE CUMMINGS (The Wall Street Journal): Well, one of the things I was curious about is even though the charges are not directly to the underlying crime, is there any chance this future investigation of his might still probe that area and also does it really matter? I mean, he--Scooter Libby is still looking at, you know, a maximum of 30 years or something. Does it really matter that the charge itself is not specifically related to that leak?

Mr. WILLIAMS: Well, he seemed to say that--today no. He said, don't--you know, don't blame me if I start out here and I end up here--if I'm investigating embezzlement and it turns out it's actually wire fraud. He said, you know, we're still at the end of the day holding somebody accountable for their actions. I think the answer to your question is, as a practical matter, no, we're never going to get the answer to that question. If Scooter Libby is convicted, the prosecutor is not going to come and say, `OK, now we know what you really said. Now let's go back and finish the jigsaw puzzle.' Not going to happen.

Mr. TODD PURDUM (The New York Times): Michael or Pete, in a trial what do we have to learn that we don't already know about the workings of the Bush White House, the run-up to the war, the rationales and justifications for the war. That's, after all, what Joe Wilson's mission was about, and it's what the criticism of Joe Wilson by the White House was about.

Mr. DUFFY: I think that--go ahead.

IFILL: Before you answer that I just want to listen to a little bit about what he had to say about that because Pat Fitzgerald was asked today, `What about the war? Wasn't that the real fight that this was all about? And this is what he said.

Mr. FITZGERALD: This indictment is not about the war. This indictment's not about the propriety of the war. And people who believe fervently in the war effort, people who oppose it, people who are--have mixed feelings about it should not look to this indictment for any resolution of how they feel or any vindication of how they feel.

IFILL: Michael.

Mr. DUFFY: You know, the investigation may nearly be over, but I do think things could come out in a trial that aren't in the indictment. One of the things that's clear from the indictment is that Libby had a number of conversations, eight or nine, with different people in the administration--the vice president, the chief intelligence officer at State, apparently the number one or number two person at the CIA and numerous White House officials about not just how this mission happened but what they were going to do about it once they had the information about Wilson in hand. And Wilson was a critic who was basically claiming the administration had gone to war knowingly, you know, not on a hunch but under false pretenses. How they reacted--and it's going to be a key part, I think, of the trial because those people will be called to testify. It could be that the vice president is called to testify, as well as some of the other people named in the indictment...

Mr. PURDUM: Apparently, the journalists--Right?--could be.

Mr. DUFFY: ...as well as the journalists are called to testify. Just to set the stage, because he talked a lot today about the state of mind of Libby. What--why--he implied more than stated, but implied what was going through his mind in getting to the bottom of that so he could explain to people why they wanted to put this out.

Mr. WILLIAMS: And that's the first thing that his lawyer will try to get excluded. There's a lot in this indictment. I think the other thing that would come out in the trial--to say the obvious thing--is Scooter Libby's side of the story. And his lawyer put out a statement today saying, `Wait a minute. You're going to go back now for a guy who comes in early in the morning, works late at night on issues that come at him like water from a fire hydrant, and you're gonna go back and say there are irreconcilable differences between what people remember about something a couple of years ago.' That's the nature of these cases, and that's the risky part.

Ms. CUMMINGS: Well, wait...

IFILL: Let's back--well, let's back up for a second, 'cause there's--I've been scratching my head about a couple of things all day, and one of them is where is Robert Novak in all of this? We have been led to believe that he was the big--the first beginning of all of this, and it turns out that Judy Miller, the reporter for The New York Times, actually was contacted prior to Robert Novak, didn't write about it. Robert Novak did. He was barely mentioned in that indictment today.

Mr. DUFFY: But there's--that mystery does--remains unanswered, and where I think that may still come out--it's possible that, as many people have suggested, that Novak has testified and perhaps is cooperating, perhaps his sources are cooperating, perhaps some of them are mentioned in this indictment. We don't know.

IFILL: There was some--a mysterious mention of an Official A, who was the one who talked to Rove but, I mean...

Mr. DUFFY: A number of unnamed officials are in the--a number of unnamed officials are in the indictment, and it may be that that also comes out in trial, but we don't know. It may not be necessary, on the other hand, to do it. There will be some things at the end of this I think we'll never know.

IFILL: Yeah.

Mr. WILLIAMS: By the way, one little thing here, and it was in the soundbite you had of Fitzgerald. He did conclude that Valerie Plame's cover was blown. That's important because, remember, there was a time when this all began...

IFILL: He did.

Mr. WILLIAMS: ...that people said, `Well, there couldn't possibly be a crime.' By then, she was no longer covert. She was driving her car to the CIA. She was no longer under cover, and he has concluded that that is not the case.

Ms. CUMMINGS: Well, did we know whether...

Mr. PURDUM: Well, he made the point that her ...(unintelligible) was classified in, you know, regards...

Ms. CUMMINGS: Yeah.

Mr. WILLIAMS: He wouldn't come out and say...

Mr. PURDUM: Yeah.

Ms. CUMMINGS: Yeah.

Mr. WILLIAMS: ...that she was under cover, but I think that's simply because...

Mr. PURDUM: You never talk about that.

Mr. WILLIAMS: ...he was worried that that's still classified.

Mr. DUFFY: And it may be a distinction that is important.

Ms. CUMMINGS: And do we have any better sense now about damage? If, you know, her cover was blown, what--was there damage to our national security or to agents? What's the fallout there?

Mr. DUFFY: As you know, in some of his filings, he's included multiple pages, 11 pages of information that is redacted and blacked out. And that's another thing we don't know, perhaps that gets at the damage. If you talk to intelligence officials, they disagree about this and it tends to be on the--when you get them to agree, it tends to be on the low side of damage. But the law doesn't really care about damage. It cares about disclosure. The dam--even at the CIA, the function that sort of forces the referral to justice to get this whole thing going is a completely separate office than the one that looks at the damage, and they go on separate tracks.

Mr. WILLIAMS: Although, by the way, he admitted today--`admitted' maybe isn't the right word--he acknowledged today that even if he had found--even if everyone had cooperated a hundred percent, including Scooter Libby, it's still not clear he could have made a case that someone broke the law in blowing her cover. He said that the section of the espionage law that says you can't give classified information to somebody not cleared to get it is very difficult to work with, and it's apparently the Justice Department's position that you can't use that section to handle a case like this...

Mr. DUFFY: But I...

Mr. WILLIAMS: ...because that's why they passed the Identities Protection Act in the first place.

Mr. DUFFY: I think that's the weirdest part of the whole case. Reading the indictment, you actually ask yourself over and over, why did he make up--if he made up these stories--why he made up these stories about...

IFILL: Right. Right.

Mr. DUFFY: ...these conversations. It looks like he could have maybe told the truth and nothing would have happened.

IFILL: But that's where we go into the part we don't know.

Mr. DUFFY: Right.

IFILL: What we do know is what he was actually charged with today. And, of course, this is Patrick Fitzgerald's version of the story, but it may--he seemed to make clear that even if he had been--that even if--he couldn't ever get to the nub of the case about whether Valerie Plame was--who did it.

Mr. DUFFY: Right.

IFILL: Because what Scooter Libby said to him, he says, was enough of an obstruction--in fact, let's listen to that 'cause he talked about that a little bit.

Mr. FITZGERALD: Let's not presume that Mr. Libby's guilty, but let's assume for the moment that the allegations in the indictment are true. If that is true, you cannot figure out the right judgment to make whether or not you should charge someone with a serious national security crime or walk away from it or recommend any other course of action if you don't know the truth.

Mr. DUFFY: Now the thing...

IFILL: Now you can't get to it...

Mr. DUFFY: Right.

IFILL: ...after--without getting past the obstruction part.

Mr. DUFFY: But in Libby's defense--and then the lawyer made this point as well--not only did we testify several times, we waived our Fifth Amendment privileges. Getting waivers--these reporters' efforts to get waivers from Libby were very easy compared to some other witnesses. I mean, he did not--with the exception potentially of Miller, he did not actually make it difficult for other reporters to actually testify in this case. So that will be part of his defense also.

Ms. CUMMINGS: One of the things that we heard at the beginning of all of this is that there might be two tracks in the investigation; one at the source and one that people who fanned the flames of the story, who continued to pass on her name after the Novak column, that they, too, might face some kind of charges, and we don't have that, obviously. Do you have any idea what happened to that aspect of the investigation or was it ever really serious?

Mr. WILLIAMS: There's no indication that it was really serious. He set out to see who the leaker to Novak was and then got on the track with Scooter Libby and that's where he felt he could go. And I think the reason he says he can't decide whether to choose--find out whether anybody violated the rule on blowing her cover is that he doesn't know what his motive was, and that's a key point.

IFILL: Well, we--maybe that's what a trial will tell us.

Analysis: Withdrawal of Harriet Miers as Supreme Court nominee

GWEN IFILL, host: Well, even without today's legal action, it would have been an amazingly bad week for the president. Only yesterday, his nominee to the Supreme Court was forced to pull the plug on her own nomination. With Democrats basically on the sideline as Republicans took on one of their own, it was left to Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter to marvel at the collapse of Harriet Miers' nomination.

Senator ARLEN SPECTER (Chairman, Judiciary Committee): (From Thursday) I do regret that our constitutional process was not completed. Instead of a hearing before the Judiciary Committee and a debate on the Senate floor, Ms. Miers' qualifications were subjected to a one-sided debate in news releases, press conferences, radio and TV talk shows and the editorial pages.

IFILL: But to hear the president tell it, Jeanne, it wasn't the one-sided debate that drove her out; it was her standing on the altar of executive privilege.

Ms. JEANNE CUMMINGS (The Wall Street Journal): Well, that's a good reason to say that's why she's out, but there's a lot more to this story. I mean, this was just remarkable--this was a real civil war within the Republican Party played out for all of us to see that ended with the president surrendering to his conservative base. It was really an astonishing display of weakness by an administration that prides itself on its own strength. And what made it all so fascinating--it was completely unpredictable and so many things were turned upside down. I mean, the very religious leaders who said there can't be a religious test turned out to climb on board because there was a religious test.

IFILL: Right.

Ms. CUMMINGS: And abortion didn't really take her down, the legal conservatives took her down. And people who had piously said every one of these nominees should receive an up-and-down vote in the Senate wouldn't even give her a hearing. But what's most puzzling is what in the world convinced the president in the beginning, and this being the flaw that took it all down, that he could appoint his personal counsel to the Supreme Court after promising a justice in the mold of Scalia and Thomas?

IFILL: Shades of Abe Fortas. But if indeed what happened was that the White House maybe shouldn't have nominated her, after he did nominate her, was the White House not prepared to get her through? Because some of the mistakes that were made, like filling out the bad first questionnaire form, were just White House mistakes.

Ms. CUMMINGS: Well, they were. There was one self-inflicted wound after another. It's obvious when they rolled her out, they didn't--had no idea what was coming because it was after he brought her out and talked about what a great corporate lawyer she was and a woman rising and breaking through glass ceilings--that obviously was their first package. And then when there was an immediate reaction from the base of who is she and how--`Why should we trust her? She's Souter. She's Souter, a stealth candidate,' well, then all of a sudden comes the church stuff and done really badly.

IFILL: Yeah.

Ms. CUMMINGS: And then it was just one mistake after another. But the thing that is also amazing is when she finally sent eight boxes of documents to the Judiciary Committee last night, some of who looked at it discovered that what was in there would have set off a bomb in the Senate. Because where they had asked her, `What have you worked on for the White House? What have you worked on for the president? Don't give us your internal memos, but what are the topics?' so they would know what does she have to recuse herself on if she gets to court?--they were like 180 pages of White House policy documents.

IFILL: Oh.

Mr. MICHAEL DUFFY: And the question you asked at the beginning is an interesting one. Why do you think he did it? What's the--after, you know, three or four weeks of reporting this, what can you tell us anything about what they think.

Ms. CUMMINGS: What he thought?

Mr. DUFFY: Yeah, what he thought.

Ms. CUMMINGS: I've got to admit, this remains a real puzzle for me. I think he wanted to appoint a candidate who would get through like Roberts, who would draw some Democratic support, who was not well-known. He didn't want to pick the big fight with the Democrats. And the truth is on the short list, the women judges who were out there on the appellate courts are actually the most strident. They are--they've got the strongest records that--in opposition to Roe v. Wade and that sort of thing. And he had other options. He had a Michigan judge and he had a few others on the appellate court without terribly inciteful records. But in the end, Miers was the cleanest in that regard, too clean, it turns out...

IFILL: Yeah.

Ms. CUMMINGS: ...for his own base.

Mr. TODD PURDUM (The New York Times): Jeanne, you know, it reminds me a little bit of what happened to so many people in the Clinton administration who came up from Arkansas where they had sterling reputations and something went wrong in Washington and the president abandoned them. Harriet Miers came from Dallas with a top-notch reputation as a Texas lawyer, first female president of the state bar and so forth, and she seemed to be a loyal servant of the president. She was doing well...

IFILL: We said the president's not abandoning her; she's still White House counsel.

Mr. PURDUM: Fair enough, but, I mean, it seems to me her reputation is worse than it was three weeks ago, and that's a very painful thing for her, I assume.

Ms. CUMMINGS: Well, it's true. I'm--the president did her no favors in this, and that is where the whole White House operation just completely failed. Her own operation failed her. They were supposed to vet her behind her back? I mean, this is...

IFILL: She had her deputy--her deputy vetted her.

Ms. CUMMINGS: And what kind of conflict...

IFILL: Yeah.

Ms. CUMMINGS: ...of interest is that? It's ridiculous. She had to run down to Dallas to try to gather records, you know, three days after her name had been announced.

Mr. PURDUM: Wow.

Ms. CUMMINGS: And then comes back with that abortion questionnaire to try to shore herself up with social conservatives. It's unsigned. It's unclear. They never endorsed her, so it's unclear who it was submitted to. And so I think that in the end, her own operation failed her as well.

Mr. PETER WILLIAMS (NBC News): Jeanne, does this doom the possibility--I'm sure the White House will now want somebody who's more or less a sure bet--but does this doom the possibility of getting someone who's not a judge, somebody who's from outside, as they like to say in the Senate these days, outside the judicial monastery?

Ms. CUMMINGS: I don't think so. And I think it's up to the president. He still--the dynamics are different. He's weaker now, but he still has the same choices and there are a few people, Senator Cornyn, for instance, academics that could come in and, you know, still have a record, still have good solid standing with social conservatives, but not be off a bench somewhere.

Analysis: Condition of Bush presidency

GWEN IFILL, host: So the question tonight becomes have we been here before? Maybe not exactly, but it all does seem mighty familiar. A president under siege. A Congress in uproar. The unmistakable scent of Washington malfeasance, all against a backdrop of a bloody war that is not going particularly well.

So, Todd, was this the president's worst political week ever?

Mr. TODD PURDUM (The New York Times): I think it was his worst political week. I mean, obviously, it's almost tasteless to talk about any week being worse than the week of September 11th because at a human level and at the American people's level...

IFILL: Right.

Mr. PURDUM: ...that was the worst week. But for his own political standing, I think you have to make this just about the toughest week he had. He passed the 2,000 mark on fatalities in Iraq. He had this withdrawal of the Miers nomination. He dodged the bullet with Karl Rove, but, I mean, having the chief of staff to the most powerful vice president in American history indicted is not a small thing. And let's not forget that Scooter Libby was also an assistant to the president. He was the so-called participant in the principals meetings. He was the vice president's national security adviser. The point that was brought home, frankly, in recent weeks when you'd see him every morning going portal to portal in his government car with a driver, whereas poor Karl Rove was coming out of his driveway in his own car...

IFILL: His own Jaguar, but his own car.

Mr. PURDUM: Fair point, but, you know, his own Jaguar.

IFILL: Well, is this second term-itis we're talking about?

Mr. PURDUM: I think it's second term-itis. I think it's bubble-itis. I think this president has never liked conflicting advice. He's never been particularly open to criticism. Some people I was talking to this week told me that as recently as 10 days or so ago, he seemed to still be in a sense of sort of denial, saying everything would be OK. He was not interested in hearing advice about how he needed to bring in an outsider, shake up his staff, maybe bring a new chief of staff the way President Reagan did in the wake of the Iran-Contra scandal. And when you point--this is not Vietnam and it's not Watergate, but an interesting thing happened today with Scooter Libby. The origins of this were very much like the origins of the Nixon's White House attempt to discredit a person like Daniel Ellsberg who was the Pentagon analyst...

Mr. MICHAEL DUFFY: Right.

Mr. PURDUM: ...who had leaked the Pentagon Papers, which raised a lot of doubts about the rationale for the Vietnam War. And the Nixon administration, to discredit him, broke into a psychiatrist's office. They created the plumbers and it was to hide the existence of the plumbers...

Mr. DUFFY: Right.

Mr. PURDUM: ...and all of those things that the White House worked so hard to hide the Watergate break-in, and we know where that led, so...

Mr. PETER WILLIAMS (NBC News): Is there any possibility that--maybe either one of you can answer this one--that had they not known--I mean, we knew this was coming because the grand jury's term was expiring.

IFILL: Right.

Mr. WILLIAMS: So we knew that Friday was D-Day for this. Had they not known that, would they still have done with Harriet Miers what they did? Would she have done it on Thursday, the day before?

Mr. PURDUM: It sounds as if, from what our reporting suggests, that that was in fact on a track toward doom independently, because the Senate was doing some nose counting and the White House aides who were doing her murder boards, realized that she was gonna get killed, you know, in the murder boards.

Ms. JEANNE CUMMINGS (The Wall Street Journal): She was not doing well.

Mr. PURDUM: And they--it was a combination of the White House's increasing shakiness about her own abilities, and the Senate's cold-eyed reading--people like Jeff Sessions and others who should have been sympathetic to her were telling the White House...

Ms. CUMMINGS: The message...

IFILL: Murder board--I just want to say murder boards, right away...

Ms. CUMMINGS: Oh, yes.

IFILL: ...for people who aren't of, you know...

Mr. PURDUM: Oh, drills, internal drills.

IFILL: Internal drills before the hearing.

Mr. PURDUM: No one was killing her...

Ms. CUMMINGS: Exactly. Yes.

Mr. PURDUM: ...but she might have, you know, metaphorically had a hard time.

Ms. CUMMINGS: But the White House had gotten notice last night that in all likelihood, she was going to be defeated in committee, that Brownback and Coburn, possibly Sessions, were going to vote against her. And so she was effectively dead.

Mr. DUFFY: Can they restart--this was the expression everyone uses now--you know, can they reset, restart, relight--in 1986...

Mr. WILLIAMS: Reboot.

Mr. DUFFY: Reboot. In 1986, they overhauled--they changed chief of staff, change of national security advisers, change of the whole communications team, and that seems impossible now that given the way Bush operates. You can't imagine them sort of replacing, you know, a whole new group of people on that--and you said there's no appetite for it. So how do they do it?

Mr. PURDUM: I'm really not sure. I'm not sure. We're coming into the holiday season; maybe they pray. I don't know, but it's a very interesting time. And, look, this president has succeeded in the past when people thought he couldn't fail. He's the sort of--he keeps getting the ball back across the net. He always makes some kind of forward movement. So I don't think it's safe to count him out. He has 39 months left.

Ms. CUMMINGS: But, Todd, it seems to me that this--at the heart of this indictment is the war, and it just dredges up a subject that they have been trying to move away from. And it not only now--I mean, now they've been battling the 2,000 deaths and the present-day problems in Iraq, but this brings back all of the questions about--did they tell the truth and did they manipulate evidence? And I mean, it seems to throw all that back in his lap.

Mr. PURDUM: I think you're really right, Jeanne. And the polls have consistently shown over the past six months or so that that's really the wound that's bleeding the president bit by bit by a thousand cuts. The ongoing uncertainty there, the military's own doubts about what can be accomplished politically. And, you know, there's been good news: the constitution referendum--that's better than the alternative. But I think it's a long hard slog and it's hard for the president.

IFILL: Well, it's also interesting, in your story today, you quoted former Senator--former UN Ambassador Jack Danforth, noted Republican moderate, saying, you know, he played to his base and they kicked him in the rear. So does he keep playing to the base or do they rethink that?

Mr. PURDUM: Well, I think given this president's premium on loyalty, one of the fascinating things to watch...

Mr. DUFFY: Right.

Mr. PURDUM: ...will be whether he does, because I suspect that his human instinct and his Bushian instinct--if he's his mother's son, as he often says he is, will be to tell those people to take a hike and not get in his face ever again. I'm not sure he can politically afford to quite do that, but I think a creative opportunity for him exists.

IFILL: OK. Well, thank you, everybody. Fascinating conversation, full week.

GWEN IFILL, host: I can't leave, however, tonight without a word or two about a woman whose silent, solitary decision to sit down probably allowed me to sit down here every Friday night. Rosa Parks was quiet, but she was not retiring. She was determined, but she was not alone, and the life she lived reminded us how to be courageous at a time when people who looked like her and like me were still being lynched for doing less. Our condolences go out this week to her family.

Next week, we may have a Supreme Court nomination and who knows what else. Keep up on daily developments on "The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer." And if you want to catch tonight's show plus our Web exclusive extra later in the week, you can download the WASHINGTON WEEK podcast onto your MP3 player. Sign up at pbs.org.

And we will see you next week on WASHINGTON WEEK. Good night.