trishswitezer

But many legal experts pointed out that Obama became president at noon on Tuesday, regardless of whether the oath was off or not. Watch whether Obama was really president Tuesday afternoon »

So I didn't think too much of the story until about 7:20 p.m. on Wednesday, when I noticed something odd as I stood in the West Wing of the White House, just a couple hundred feet from the Oval Office.

Suddenly I overheard White House senior adviser David Axelrod say, "Thank you, Mr. Chief Justice, for coming over."

It's not very often that I've heard a phrase like that, especially one day after the inaugural. So my ears perked up at the possibility that I had bumped into the chief justice and landed a big scoop headlined, "Chief justice visits White House to apologize to president about inaugural snafu."

I really didn't even think about the possibility of a second swearing-in. It seemed so implausible. So I started digging around to try to confirm my assumption: that Roberts, mortified over the mix-up, had come over for a quiet and quick apology to the new president.