Waas reports on the "damage control" effort undertaken to protect Bush's 2004 re-election prospects. With respect to the notorious "aluminum tubes" Waas writes:
"Presidential knowledge was the ball game," says a former senior government official outside the White House who was personally familiar with the damage-control effort. "The mission was to insulate the president. It was about making it appear that he wasn't in the know. You could do that on Niger. You couldn't do that with the tubes." A Republican political appointee involved in the process, who thought the Bush administration had a constitutional obligation to be more open with Congress, said: "This was about getting past the election."
story via HuffPo
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