On April 3, late on a Friday afternoon, the Justice Department asked a judge to dismiss a lawsuit filed against the National Security Administration for unlawfully spying on Americans’ telephone records. In its brief, the Justice Department made two arguments:
First, it claimed that allowing the lawsuit to proceed would result in the disclosure of [...]

George W. Bush’s public statements have been absurd for so long, that it’s almost poor sport to continue to skewer them. Nevertheless, because I haven’t done so on BTC News in quite a while, and because this may be my last opportunity, I can’t resist one last shot. For auld lang syne, as it were.
When [...]

On Monday at the White House press briefing, Press Secretary Dana Perino declined to answer when I asked her whether the White House would apologize for last Friday’s raid by U.S. forces in Iraq that reportedly killed a relative of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.
The slain man, Ali Abdul Hussein al-Maliki, was described as the [...]

BTC News contributor Eric Brewer, now reporting from the White House for online magazine Raw story, challenged Bush press secretary Dana Perino on the president’s claim that al Qaeda in Iraq might one day appropriate Iraq’s oil and use the funds for their own purposes.
This isn’t a new claim—Bush has made it before, as [...]

Today at the White House press briefing, I got into a somewhat heated (on my part) dispute with John Gizzi, political editor of the right wing web magazine HumanEvents.com. It happened like this…
Earlier in the briefing, the press was asking Tony Snow some pretty good questions about Bush’s commutation yesterday of Scooter Libby’s prison sentence. [...]

In which Tony dodges questions about the U.S. Attorney firings…

Tony Snow laughed at me today in the White House briefing room after I asked him a question inspired by John Yoo’s vigorous defense, in an op-ed in last Sunday’s NY Times, of the Supreme Leader style of government that Mr. Yoo helped fashion when he worked in Bush’s Justice Department in the two years after the 9/11 attacks.

Tony Snow does his best to control the damage after Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki, speaking to reporters on Thursday, denounced coalition troops’ treatment of Iraqi civilians.

Today during the White House briefing I asked Tony Snow this question: There have been news reports this week that the FBI is using the Patriot Act to obtain phone records of journalists without their knowledge and without judicial oversight. As a former journalist, are you at all concerned about this sort of intrusion on press freedom? Tony denied the allegation…

The White House press corps gave Tony Snow rock star treatment for his first televised press conference today. It was standing room only.

Today at the White House I asked Scott McClellan about this bombshell buried near the end of R. Jeffrey Smith and Dafna Linzer’s ’s article on the firing of Mary McCarthy from the CIA in last Sunday’s Washington Post: “The White House also has recently barraged the agency with questions about the political affiliations of some of its senior intelligence officers, according to intelligence officials.”

In March of 2005, BTC News succeeded in gaining access to the White House press room for Eric Brewer, who instantly became our senior White House correspondent. Since then, he has attended perhaps two dozen briefings and asked some of the best questions posed by anyone in the room, knocking White House press secretary Scott McClellan off balance and off message on a few occasions, and getting some actually revealing answers on a few others.

In March of 2005, BTC News succeeded in gaining access to the White House press room for Eric Brewer, who instantly became our senior White House correspondent. Since then, he has attended perhaps two dozen briefings and asked some of the best questions posed by anyone in the room, knocking White House press secretary Scott McClellan off balance and off message on a few occasions, and getting some actually revealing answers on a few others.

Today Scott called on everyone else in the first four rows of the briefing room, some of them multiple times, but he didn’t call on me. I’m a little frustrated about not getting to ask my question (what it something I said? was my last post to cruel), but knowing that the White House hates me and/or is afraid of me is some compensation.

Nevertheless, it was a pretty interesting day. The place was jammed, and the first twenty questions dealt with Patrick Fitzgerald’s late Wednesday night bombshell revelation that, according to Lewis Libby, the president authorized Libby’s leak to Judy Miller of information from the top secret National Intelligence Estimate.

Today I finally got another chance to get Scott McClellan riled up. Ever since the last time I did it, back in January, he’s been lucky enough or tricky enough to avoid having to call on me, but today, the briefing room wasn’t quite as crowded as it has been, and I got my chance to ask a question that has been puzzling me ever since the Director of National Intelligence ,John Negroponte, testified to the Senate on February 2 that, “Tehran has been responsible for at least some of the increasing lethality of anti-coalition attacks by providing Shia militia with the capability to build improvised explosive devices with explosively formed projectiles similar to those developed by Iran and Lebanese Hizballah.”

Nobody paid any attention a couple of weeks ago when I reported last year’s rather startling increase in worldwide terrorism. The data, compiled by the RAND Corporation and available to the public at tkb.org, showed that, worldwide, the sum of “international” and “domestic” terrorist attacks increased by more than 50% between 2004 and 2005. So, I went to the White House today and asked Scott McClellan for his take.

There have been some interesting recent developments in the CIA’s Italian kidnapping caper. The case came to light last June, when an Italian judge issued arrest warrants for 13 CIA agents for nabbing Egyptian Muslim cleric Hassan Nasr (aka ‘Abu Omar’) off a street in Milan on February 17, 2003, and shipping him, via an American airbase in Germany, to Egypt, where he was allegedly tortured. Egypt wanted Nasr, 42, because of his involvement in Jemaah Islamiah, an organization dedicated to establishing an Islamic government in Egypt. During a crackdown on Jemaah Islamiah in the early 1990s, Nasr fled Egypt and eventually received asylum in Italy in 1997.

Today, I asked both Press Secretary Scott McClellan and National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley about recent reports that the Italian government was involved in the Iraq-Niger hoax.

White House reporters were not thrown completely off the Plame scent by the Alito nomination today. David Gregory and Terry Moran led the charge against Scott McClellan, landing some hard-hitting nibbles in the course of challenging the White House’s credibility.

The first vague stirrings were felt on Monday, October 3, when emails originating from friends and relatives of Department of Homeland Security officials made the rounds among a small group of New York’s elite. Thanks to pressure on the media from “federal and local authorities”, the lower classes didn’t hear anything until after Bush’s Iraq/Terrorism speech on Thursday the 6th, when “Washington signed off on the declassification process” necessary for alerting the public.

BTC News White House correspondent Eric Brewer asked a question in yesterday’s White House press briefing that neatly highlighted the hypocrisy of this administration, not that that’s been an extraordinary challenge of late.

I went to the White House twice last week, trying to ask a question that had been suggested to me by Brad Friedman when I was on his Brad Show a couple of weekends ago.

Today Scott McClellan took time out from dodging questions about the Rove-Plame scandal to deny the truth of last year’s major increase in international terrorism.

Today, Tony Blair came to visit George Bush at the White House. After their private meeting, they spoke briefly to the press. They each gave a short speech (Bush playing Sonny Liston—plodding, belligerent, aggrieved—to Blair’s Cassius Clay—happy, dancing, glittering), then each of them took two questions from the gathering of over 100 reporters in the [...]

Today in the White House briefing room, I asked Scott McClellan this question:
Scott, last week you said that claims in the leaked Downing Street memo that intelligence was being fixed to support the Iraq War as early as July 2002 are “flat-out wrong.” According to the memo, which was dated July 23, 2002, and whose [...]

I went to the White House press briefing twice this week, on Thursday and Friday, hoping to get a response to the recent revelation in the London Sunday Times that, eight months before the Iraq invasion, “intelligence and facts were being fixed” to support Bush’s war plan.
On Thursday, the reporters in the two-thirds-full briefing [...]

Duncan Black at Atrios suggests that if the press corpse can’t wean themsleves from the anonymous briefings, they should at least take advantage of the opportunity to leak the briefers’ names to bloggers or to Slate’s Jack Shafer, who has generously offered to serve as a conduit. But that’s not a solution, really: it’s more like a national press version of the MTV series, “Punk’d.”

Is it over so soon? I must’ve said something wrong the last time I talked to Scott, because today, when I tried to get his attention during the White House press briefing, he wouldn’t even look at me. Thirty-five minutes into the briefing he abruptly said, “Thank you,” and that was that — I was [...]

Say what you will about McClellan (and of course we won’t lest we lose the opportunity to not get more questions answered), he’s consistent.

And no, I’m not fooling, but I do apologize in advance for asking a question that I knew would merely trigger one of Scott McClellan’s rote little speeches. But I couldn’t help it. I was so stirred by the report that came out yesterday from Bush’s Presidential Commission to Blame Everyone But the White House [...]

I’m writing this in the basement of the White House, at an empty desk in the warren of cubbyholes used by members of the press in between events upstairs in the briefing room. I arrived shortly after 9 am, expecting to attend the scheduled 9:30 “gaggle” and then the televised 12:30 briefing with Scott McClellan, [...]