Senior Administration Official Guessing Game Results: The Alito Nomination Players

Here is the first wave of responses to the inaugural installment of the Senior Administration Official Guessing Game. We wanted to know: Who was the administration official who tattled to the Times about the White House’s successful “pitch Alito as boring but levelheaded” strategy?

One of you immediately guessed, “Karl Rove!” But, contrary to general belief, Rove is not behind everything that happens in this town.

More guesses — including what appears to be a very informed one — after the jump.

Samuel Alito himself — okay, not the newly confirmed justice, but just the author of the Samuel Alito Blog — wrote in to say:

Dear Wonkette,

The administration official who spoke to David Kirkpatrick was Rachel Brand (see right). I have two reasons to support this:

(1) She was the only one who laughed at my lame joke. Not that she thought it was funny; she knew I was winning.

(2) She is attractive and you can speculate about her sex life. Perfect for Wonkette.

—Sam

Okay, we’re getting warmer. But it probably wasn’t the lovely and high-powered Ms. Brand, for reasons set forth below. A Pentagon-based Wonkette reader offers this very impressive response:

1. Source was DoJ, not White House. Anyone working for the Exec Office of the Pres would be referred to as a “White House Official,” not an “administration official.”

2. The quote was not from a “senior administration official,” but merely an “administration official,” so I’ll assume the source holds a position which does not require Senate confirmation. This takes out of running the very attractive Rachel Brand, who, as an Assistant AG, would be a “senior administration official”

3. The source has to be in a position with access to WH and DoJ political strategists, so it would not be any of the lawyers from the Legal Policy or Civil Rights, who would be more focused on the substance of testimony prep and not the images and style.

4. This leaves four likely candidates: Kyle Sampson, chief of staff to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales; Raul Yanes, senior counsel to the attorney general; Jamie Brown, Office of Professional Responsibility, former special assistant to President Bush, Legislative Affairs; and Elisebeth Cook, Office of the Attorney General.

Now I just have to guess — so I’ll pick Elisebeth Cook, who since she was not ID’ed in the National Law Journal with a portfolio at DoJ, could well be the AG’s media/press special assistant.

Not bad! This sounds pretty good to us. But if you have contrary intelligence, please drop us a line.

Correction: Elisebeth Collins Cook is actually an attorney with the Office of Legal Policy, as opposed to the Office of the Attorney General. Thus, under the reasoning set forth above, she probably was not Kirkpatrick’s source; we are left to guess between Sampson, Yanes, and Brown.

Also, we didn’t receive any guesses for the second item in our guessing game: the Democratic staffer who — quite presciently, as it turns out — told James Flug that the Vanguard issue was a non-starter. C’mon, people, you can do better!

READ MORE: Department of Justice, david kirkpatrick, elisebeth collins cook, elisebeth cook, james flug, jamie brown, karl rove, kyle sampson, office of legal policy, rachel brand, raul yanes, samuel alito, senate judiciary committee, senior administration official guessing game, supreme court, white house counsel’s office

Senior Administration Official Guessing Game: The Alito Nomination Players

Over at Gawker, our celeb-obsessed, Gotham-based sibling, they do blind item guessing games. Here at Wonkette, we offer more sophisticated, highbrow fun. Welcome to Senior Administration Official Guessing Game!

Here’s how it works: We offer up some quotes from unidentified officials. You send us your guesses as to the identities of those officials, along with supporting reasoning (if any), by email. We’ll share the results with you later in the day.

With a vote on the Supreme Court nomination of Judge Samuel Alito scheduled to take place later this morning, today’s items will focus on players in the Alito nomination drama. They come from this delightfully gossipy article, Two Nominee Strategies — One Worked, by David D. Kirkpatrick of the New York Times (best known for his sinister-sounding exposés of the vast right-wing conspiracy, like this piece).

Without further ado, here’s the first item up for bids:

The week before his Supreme Court confirmation hearings, Judge Samuel A. Alito Jr. e-mailed the text of his opening statement to the White House. It included very little about his legal thinking, dwelled at length on his family and opened with a tired and rambling joke about courtroom banter between a lawyer and a judge.

The response from the White House: “Perfect, don’t change a word,” according to an administration official who was granted anonymity because Judge Alito’s preparation sessions were confidential.

“Any time they are yelling, preaching, lecturing, and you are cool and calm and breathing deep, you are winning,” the administration official said the White House team told Judge Alito. “What that means on television sets where the American people are watching this is, you look good and they look bad. It was the central operating premise.”

To narrow down your list of suspects, check out the catalog of Alito “murder board” participants at the end of this article from the National Law Journal.

Additional items after the jump.

Here’s the next item for your consideration:

[Kennedy staffer James] Flug drove the investigation into Judge Alito’s failure to recuse himself, as he had pledged to do during his court of appeals confirmation hearing, from cases involving his mutual fund company, Vanguard. But Mr. Flug met with polite skepticism from many of his colleagues.

“You are going to ask more questions about that oversight where Alito made no money?” a staff member for another Democratic senator said he asked Mr. Flug.

“It became clear to us early on,” the staff member added, “that the guy may be way too far right for our tastes, but we think the guy is a man of honor.”

Two Nominee Strategies — One Worked [New York Times]

READ MORE: david kirkpatrick, james flug, samuel alito, senate judiciary committee, senior administration official guessing game, supreme court, ted kennedy, vanguard