Foggy Bottom Follies: "Enigmatic Hillaryland." Which way will Hillary the Cat jump on Gunwalker?

"I did not have bureaucratic relations with that Attorney General. Eric Holder."

Ben Smith, writing at Politico, gives us an interesting take on Her Royal Highness at State: "Crowley leaves an enigmatic Hillaryland." Pay particular attention to the last three paragraphs.

P.J. Crowley's resignation as Assistant Secretary of State was, as he wrote in a resignation statement, determined the moment he agreed to make comments on Bradley Manning detention public, but it also offers a glimpse of the odd internal politics of the Clinton State Department.

Crowley was never supposed to be the on-camera briefer, people who speak to him have long said. He was supposed to administer the department's communications, took the job with some reluctance, and has been rumored to be on the way out since the day he started.

He also never penetrated Clinton's inner circle. His ill will with her unofficial spokesman and image-keeper, Philippe Reines, spilled out into the open in one Inspector General report, but Reines was never able to actually oust him -- until he ousted himself -- producing the kind of frozen political division, and endless stasis, familiar to anyone who covered Clinton's 2008 presidential campaign.

The tensions between Clinton's inner circle of Reines, counsel Cheryl Mills, and and a few others on one hand and the White House on the other seem largely to have waned since some early turf battles over appointments. But Clinton's actual role remains a central mystery of the Administration, rooted in whatever influence she's able to wield in private conversations with the President.

One recent clue was a Feb. 12 New York Times article, in which anonymous officials followed the time-honored path of shifting blame for a muddled Egypt response away from the President and on to Clinton and the State Department, casting them as sympathizers with a dictator as Obama pulled toward democracy.

Clinton didn't really push back the attack at all, a sign to different observers that she's loyally playing her role in exchange for real influence; or that the White House has her in a real box.

Or maybe she's just waiting for the right moment to stick knives in all their backs.

My sources say that if Hillary wants out of that Obama box, she has but to throw Holder (and by extension Obama) under the bus on the Gunwalker scandal. Yet apart from a Mexican embassy "clarification" that is demonstrably false (and which Hillary surely signed off on knowing it was false), she has given no particular indication that she is "loyally playing her role" in covering up the defining federal government scandal of this century.

Which way will Hillary the Cat jump? Only she knows. And as one of my sources said earlier, "She's playing her cards close to her pantsuit."