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