The talking point of the day is that the Bush/Abramoff photos are not relevant -- which, of course, means they are. What Bush said today:
President Bush deflected questions today about photographs of him with Jack Abramoff, the disgraced Republican lobbyist, saying the photos are irrelevant.Okay, well, someone thinks they're relevant enough to hide -- even though they are "not relevant." Josh Marshall unraveled that development that over at TPM. It's worth a read:
"I mean, there's thousands of people that come through and get their pictures taken," Mr. Bush said. "I'm also mindful that we live in a world in which those pictures will be used for pure political purposes, and they're not relevant to the investigation."
But early this afternoon, I decided to take one more go at Reflections. I talked to company president Joanne Amos. We went back and forth over various questions about whether photographs at the site were available to the public and why some had been removed. When she, at length, asked me who it was in the picture with the president. I told her we believed it was Jack Abramoff.For something so "not relevant," there are an awful lot of people giving them relevance.
Amos very straightforwardly told me that the photographs had been removed and that they had been removed because they showed Abramoff and the president in the same picture. The photos were, she told me, "not relevant."
When I asked her who had instructed her to remove the photos, she told me she was the president of the company. She did it. It was "her business decision" to remove the photographs. She told me she had done so within the last month.
