A number of political “dots” are lining up this morning in the wake of the Christmas Day attack, all of which point to bad news for counterterrorism center chief Mike Leiter. The New York Daily News, citing anonymous U.S. officials, reports that Leiter didn’t immediately return from a Christmas ski vacation when alleged-underpants bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab tried to blow up an airliner. That certainly looks bad, although one could argue there wasn’t a whole lot that Leiter could do other than try to piece together what went wrong. As my colleague Marc Ambinder of The Atlantic notes, the National Counterterrorism Center isn’t an operational agency. Still, the political optics of Leiter’s absence are just awful, and it looks like people within the executive branch are fitting the noose for him.

Separately, National Security Adviser Jim Jones told USA Today that the American public will be “shocked” by what they learn from an initial review of the intelligence breakdown preceding the Christmas Day attack. President Obama is supposed to speak about it this afternoon, and Jones said he’s “legitimately and correctly alarmed that things that were available, bits of information that were available, patterns of behavior that were available, were not acted on.” But be encouraged, Jones adds, “We know what happened, we know what didn’t happen, and we know how to fix it.”

None of this looks good for Leiter. If the review finds that the various intelligence dots about Abdulmutallab weren’t put together at the NCTC, it would make all the political sense in the world to replace the head of that unit. Would that fix the underlying problems? No. More on that to come in a future magazine story. But for now, the optics are what count. The president has to steel the public’s spine. “Bad things happened, we’ll make sure they don’t happen again.” The anonymous leak about Leiter’s schedule could be another scene setting move. It could also be angry sniping from those in the intelligence community who look down on the NCTC–and there are many, particularly in the State Department, the CIA, and the Homeland Security Department. But if I were Leiter, I’d be wishing I hadn’t returned from that vacation.

UPDATE: ABC News reports that the White House is defending Leiter’s absence. He was away over the holiday weekend, but not out of touch. This doesn’t relieve Leiter of the coming criticism, but it might indicate that his bureaucratic enemies are in the intelligence community, not the White House.