Are they letting Jeff Gannon back into the White House press briefings again?

QUESTION: Considering the widespread interest and the absolutely frantic Democrat reaction to Karl Rove’s excellent speech to conservatives last month, does the president hope that Karl will give a lot more speeches?

Josh Marshall raises an interesting question:

I’m curious whether today’s fireworks on the Rove/Plame matter will resurrect any more serious interest in the whole underlying issue of who forged those phoney Niger uranium documents or whether there will be more searching scrutiny into that paste-up job that was last year’s Senate Select Intelligence Committee report on Iraq intel.

As I’ve discussed at various points at TPM, the FBI has gone out of its way not to do any serious investigation into where these documents came from. The interviews they conducted in Italy were cursory. And when the man who actually peddled the documents to the Italian journalist was named publicly in several European papers, they still made no attempt to interview him — even when we brought him to the US under his own name, twice.

Dare we hope that we’ll soon see the unraveling of the whole web of Rove and Pals’ lies and dirty tricks?

Last Friday on the NewsHour on PBS, conservative columnist David Brooks tried to offer an innocent explanation for why a highly-placed White House source blew the cover of a covert CIA operative, Valerie Plame:

I’ve got an alternate story line, which was if somebody asked the people in the White House, why is this guy Wilson who writes for the Nation Magazine working for the Bush administration, and somebody says, oh, I hear his wife works at CIA; she led us to him. And that’s not a crime; that’s totally innocent. I think that’s an alternate explanation of why they mentioned this woman, Valerie Plame.

There’s a problem with this alternate story line. The exposure of Valerie Plame was not a careless offhand remark. White House officials had been “shopping the story” for a while, looking for a reporter to print it. It was no accident.

Today, according to Talking Points Memo, the White House wants to clam up on the case. White House press secretary Scott McClellan said:

This is an ongoing investigation at this point. The President directed the White House to cooperate fully with the investigation, and as part of cooperating fully with the investigation, that means we’re not going to be commenting on it while it is ongoing.

But, apparently, someone managed to sneak a spine into the press room. One reporter reacting to a later McClellan evasion:

It’s not an answer. And you were perfectly willing to comment from that podium while the investigation was going on, and try to clear Karl Rove. Why the double standard? Why were you willing to say Karl Rove was not involved when -- and talk at length about it, when the investigation was going on, and now that he’s been caught red-handed, all of a sudden you’ve got a new line?

I’m guessing we’ll soon see new security procedures for the White House press corps. Backbones and guts must be left at the door.