"In this presumption of guilt culture, which is what has come about in Washington in the last 10 or 15 years, there must be a sense of anger there and an inability to manage the facts," said Lanny J. Davis, a lawyer in Washington who was brought into the Clinton White House to help deal with the multiple investigations of that administration. "It's hard to imagine how bad it is. You sit at your desk and you know what the facts are, but you can't get them out to the public because the lawyers tell you you can't -- or if you can, the noise from the presumption of guilt culture overwhelms the facts."

Mr. Bush joked late last year with Matthew Cooper, a reporter for Time magazine, about why Mr. Cooper was not yet in jail for fighting a subpoena demanding that he testify about a conversation with a source who later turned out to be Mr. Rove. These days, though, the leak investigation is almost never spoken of openly within the West Wing, and certainly not made light of, administration officials say.

Lawyers for most of the officials who have testified before the grand jury have by and large chosen not to share information with one another, leaving colleagues largely in the dark about what others are telling Mr. Fitzgerald.

There is a presumption inside the White House that anyone who was indicted would resign or go on leave to fight the charges, though it is unclear what planning has taken place for that possibility.

The prospect of a White House without Mr. Rove, Mr. Bush's longtime strategist, has some allies of the president in a near panic, fearful that without him the administration would lose the one person capable of enforcing discipline across a party that has become increasingly fractious and that is almost at war with itself over the president's nomination of Harriet E. Miers to the Supreme Court.

With the White House stumbling and preoccupied, some allies of the president already see a policy void that is being filled by other prominent Republicans, like Senator John McCain of Arizona, who recently outmaneuvered the administration to win passage of an amendment that would set new standards to guard against the use of torture in the interrogation of detainees in the fight against terrorism.

Asked about the case in his daily on-camera news briefing on Thursday, Scott McClellan, the White House press secretary, portrayed Mr. Bush as eagerly awaiting the results of the investigation. The case centers on whether administration officials illegally disclosed the identity of the C.I.A. officer, Valerie Wilson, as part of an effort to distance the White House from criticism by her husband, Joseph C. Wilson IV. In mid-2003, Mr. Wilson, a former diplomat, became an outspoken critic of how the administration had used prewar intelligence about Iraq's weapons programs to justify the invasion.