More accurately, it was a source from the White House Counsel’s office:

The counsel’s office places part of the blame on the Office for Intergovernmental Affairs and Public Engagement, which is overseen by Obama Senior Advisor and Assistant to the President Valerie Jarrett. Jones’s “czar” job was created by the OIAPE, and Jarrett interviewed Jones for the position. In speeches before far-left groups over the past five months, Jarrett touted Jones’s hiring, in part, because the groups, many of which count 9/11 truthers and radical environmentalists and anti-capitalists as members, were familiar with Jones’s brand of anti-Americanism and economic radicalism.

(via Jim Treacher) Well, most accurately of all this was an anonymous shot from one faction of the White House against another faction of the White House. Welcome to Washington, DC.

It goes like this. The current White House Counsel is Greg Craig, and he is hated by progressives.  Partially it’s due to him being the public face of Obama’s complete capitulation on FISA, back when it became clear that he would need to do that if he ever wanted to be elected President; partially because he’s a Washington insider who is also friends with Karl Rove; and mostly because they think that he’d make a great scapegoat for this administration’s foreign policy / counter-terrorism problems.  Hence the rumors last month that he was going, probably.  All of which would put him in a different faction than, say, Valerie Jarrett – who, of course, gushed over Van Jones, back in the day.  An opposing faction, to put it mildly.  And now that Jones is gone, and people are looking for somebody to blame… somebody in the White House Counsel’s office just happens to be available for an anonymous quote to The American Spectator that just happens to cast aspersions on somebody who just happens to be on the other side of an internal grudge match.

This is what DC calls a ‘coincidence.’

Moe Lane

PS: Preventing this sort of thing – or at least minimizing it – is the job of a White House Chief of Staff.  No doubt it’ll die down, once the administration acquires a competent one.

Crossposted to Moe Lane.