Condi Rice to leave Bush administration at end of year / NYT

[xray s]

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/

(March 25, 2004 -- 11:23 PM EDT // link // print)
Watch out! A shoe just dropped!

The Times just posted a story for tomorrow's paper about Condi Rice's efforts at damage control on the Richard Clarke matter. Here's the first three grafs ...

The White House may have sent a phalanx of top officials to Capitol Hill this week to be grilled by the Sept. 11 panel, but the one official who did not appear publicly has turned out to be the official the panel wanted most: Condoleezza Rice.
As she prepares to leave her job at the end of the year, Ms. Rice, the president's national security adviser, now finds herself at the center of a political storm, furiously defending both the White House and her own reputation.

But her effort to blunt the criticism by spending the week on television and in news media briefings may have had the opposite effect. She has infuriated some members of the panel, who wonder why she has time for CNN but not for them. On Thursday they questioned again whether she should be subpoenaed to testify if she does not appear in public to answer questions about the Bush administration's handling of Al Qaeda before the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001.