Heading to the White House for a 9:30 AM meeting to talk Egypt:

George Washington University Middle East expert and Foreign Policy.com Middle East channel editor Marc Lynch; the National Security Network's Joel Rubin, a former State Department Egypt desk officer; the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace's Michele Dunne,  a former NSC and State Department Policy Planning and Egypt embassy official who co-chair a bipartisan working group on Egypt); Council on Foreign Relations's Egypt expert Steve Cook; the New America Foundation's Steve Clemons; Center for American Progress Middle East expert Brian Katulis, and former U.S. Amb. to Israel Martin Indyk, now with the Brookings Institution and an advisor to George Mitchell.

Elliott Abrams, the former Bush NSC Middle East/democracy advisor, was invited but didn't go. "I had other commitments I did not think I could fairly cancel at such short notice," he told POLITICO, but another colleague softened the implication Abrams had better things to do than offer counsel to the White House, saying he thought Abrams was out of town.

The Brookings Institution's Robert Kagan who co-chairs the Egypt working group, wanted to go but couldn't get a flight back from California in time to make it.

"We do think-tank sessions on an almost weekly basis," a senior administration official told Playbook after POLITICO reported on the planned meeting Sunday. "The goal is to bring in some of the top opinion leaders and thinkers on a given subject and have a candid conversion. We've done it with China, Afghanistan, Iraq, etc. Today's topic is Egypt."

It was a good meeting one participant said afterwards.