Bush in PR blitz amid leak probe

By Rick Klein for the Boston Globe:

WASHINGTON -- It looked like business as usual at President Bush's Cabinet meeting yesterday. And that's exactly what White House aides wanted. The president ticked off the administration's preparations for Hurricane Wilma, mentioned the need to control federal spending, even found time to tease a reporter about her sunglasses.
But seated along the edge of the room were two poker-faced men whose fates could determine Bush's effectiveness through the rest of his term in office. The possible indictments of Karl Rove and I. Lewis ''Scooter" Libby hang over virtually everything the president is doing these days, but behind the scenes, the Bush administration and its Republican allies have already launched a campaign to minimize the damage of any criminal charges.

Gotta add this one point:

With indictments possible as soon as today, Republicans are preparing a public relations blitz aimed at shoring up public support for the Bush administration. Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, a Texas Republican with close ties to the White House, said on NBC's ''Meet the Press" that indictments may be based on ''technicalities," to justify the resources spent on the probe. ''I certainly hope that if there is going to be an indictment... that it is an indictment on a crime and not some perjury technicality where they couldn't indict on the crime and so they go to something just to show that their two years of investigation was not a waste of time and taxpayer dollars," Hutchison said.
Democrats began rebutting that strategy yesterday, by pointing out some of the Republicans who spoke of the serious nature of similar charges in the late 1990s, when President Clinton was under scrutiny in the Monica Lewinsky affair.
''When a Democrat was in the White House just a few short years ago, the seriousness of perjury and obstruction was pretty much all Republicans would talk about," said Phil Singer, a spokesman for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee.