Schmidt, who has returned to his California-based political and public affairs consulting business, said that he “worked incredibly hard during the campaign to defend Sarah Palin and her family against a lot of attacks that I thought then and think today were very unfair.”

And he got in a dig at Kristol, who frequently offered unvarnished assessments of McCain’s campaign from his perch at the Standard, on Fox News, where he is a contributor, and in his then-New York Times column.

“Bill Kristol, going back to the time of the campaign, has taken a lot of cheap shots at the campaign without ever offering a plausible path to victory,” Schmidt said. “He’s in the business of ad hominem insults and criticism.”

Responding to Schmidt’s counterattack, Kristol directly fingered Schmidt: “It’s simply a fact that when the going got tough, Steve Schmidt trashed Sarah Palin, both within the campaign and (on background) to journalists. This was after Steve took credit for the Palin pick when, at first, he thought it made him look good. John McCain deserved better.”

At this, Schmidt unloaded in a lengthy telephone interview, suggesting that Kristol was carrying out a personal vendetta based out of anger over the attempt to fire Scheunemann in the final days of the campaign.

In doing so, Schmidt revealed what has been whispered about for months following the campaign: that he and another top aide had ordered a leak hunt in the campaign’s internal e-mail system.

“What this is about is a personal issue that happened late in the campaign relating to a close, personal friend of Bill Kristol and people at The Weekly Standard,” Schmidt said, refusing to use Scheunemann’s name.

“At the end of the campaign there were a series of leaks that were so damaging that it was consuming the 24-hour cable news cycle. Leaks to reporters where Sarah Palin was called all manner of names. [McCain senior adviser] Rick Davis and I jointly felt that was outrageous. So we made an attempt for the first time in the campaign to try to ID who was leaking information that was so damaging and demoralizing to a campaign that was in very difficult circumstances,” Schmidt said, noting that an IT professional executed a system-wide search by keyword.

“What was discovered was an e-mail from a very senior staff member to Bill Kristol that then entered into the news current and continued the negative in-fighting stories for an additional news cycles. I recommended tough medicine for that individual that was carried out,” Schmidt said, again referring to Scheunemann. “Bill Kristol might not have liked that decision, and he might be mad about what happened to his friend, but going all the way back he has been a part of this story and I’ve preserved his confidentiality in that until now. But his use of his public forums to take a personal fight and make character attacks is just simply dishonest and wrong.”

Scheunemann, confirming that his e-mail had been searched, accused Schmidt of “acting in a manner of Iranian secret police” in going to his account.

The foreign policy hand said what was discovered was a message from Kristol inquiring who was the source in the campaign of the “diva” leak, the now-famous complaint from a senior McCain campaign official to CNN’s Dana Bash that Palin was acting like a spoiled and selfish celebrity.

Schmidt suggested that Scheunemann had fingered Nicolle Wallace, a senior McCain adviser who helped work with Palin, to Kristol in the message.

“It led to a whole another round of speculation, including Fred Barnes the next night attacking Nicolle Wallace on the air,” Schmidt said, suggesting without saying directly that was why an effort was made to terminate Scheunemann. Barnes, another Weekly Standard editor and Fox News contributor, accused Wallace on Fox News in late October of being “a coward” for running up tens of thousands of dollars in high-end clothes for Palin and then letting the governor take the blame for the purchases. After Wallace denied she had purchased the clothes, Barnes apologized on the air the following night.

But Scheunemann said the clothes controversy was an entirely separate issue and one which he made no mention of in his e-mail to Kristol.