Key 9/11 Commission Staffer Held Secret Meetings With Rove, Scaled Back Criticisms of White House

Posted by Trish , Pensito Review at 5:41 AM on January 31, 2008.

I smell a rodent. ABC News is quoting WashingtonDeCoded's Max Holland about a soon to be released book that exposes the former executive director of the 9/11 Commission as a Bush White House insider. "[Zelikow] had laid the groundwork for much of what went wrong at the White House in the weeks and months before September 11. Would he want people to know that?"

9/11 Commission co-chairs Tom Kean and Lee Hamilton hired former Condoleezza Rice aide Philip Zelikow to be executive director, (sic) Zelikow failed to tell them about his role helping Rice set up President George W. Bush's National Security Council in early 2001 - and that he was "instrumental" in demoting Richard Clarke, the onetime White House counterterrorism czar...

"[Zelikow] had laid the groundwork for much of what went wrong at the White House in the weeks and months before September 11. Would he want people to know that?" ["The Commission: The Uncensored History of the 9/11 Investigation author Philip] Shenon writes, according to Holland.

Zelikow denied that was the case. "It was very well-known I had served on this transition team and had declined to go into the administration. I worked there for a total of one month. I had interviewed Sandy Berger, Dick Clarke and most of the NSC staff." He noted he recused himself from working on the section of the panel's report addressing the NSC transition, and that other staffers had held conflicting positions in the Clinton administration.

Did you get that? Clinton, Clinton, Clinton!

Not only did Zelikow work for Rice, he seemed to remain a tad too loyal to her as well.

Holland reports that Shenon discovered some panel staffers believed Zelikow stopped them from submitting a report depicting Rice's performance as "amount[ing] to incompetence, or something not far from it."

He also kept in close contact with Karl Rove whose business the 9/11 Commission should have been none of.

In his book, Shenon also says that while working for the panel, Zelikow appears to have had private conversations with former White House political director Karl Rove, despite a ban on such communication, according to Holland. Shenon reports that Zelikow later ordered his assistant to stop keeping a log of his calls, although the commission's general counsel overruled him, Holland wrote.

The book comes out on Feb. 5, the same day as Super Tuesday, when the newsers will be consumed in the minutiae of the Clinton/Obama contest. Chances are good it will be lost in the din. We'll try to keep an eye out for it, though, and keep you posted.

Tagged as: 9/11, rove, clinton, 9/11 commission, zelikow

Trish is a regular blogger for the Pensito Review.