Scott McCllelan: I Was Made To Lie To The Media About Plame For Bush/Cheney
Sigh…
WASHINGTON – Former White House press secretary Scott McClellan blames President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney for efforts to mislead the public about the role of White House aides in leaking the identity of a CIA operative.
In an excerpt from his forthcoming book, McClellan recounts the 2003 news conference in which he told reporters that aides Karl Rove and I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby were “not involved” in the leak involving operative Valerie Plame.
“There was one problem. It was not true,” McClellan writes, according to a brief excerpt released Tuesday. “I had unknowingly passed along false information. And five of the highest-ranking officials in the administration were involved in my doing so: Rove, Libby, the vice president, the president’s chief of staff and the president himself.”
Bush’s chief of staff at the time was Andrew Card.
There’s a problem here, unfortunately. Scooter Libby and Karl Rove weren’t involved in the leaking of Valerie Plame’s name. Assistant Secretary of State Richard Armitage is the one who leaked her name to Robert Novak.
And you can hardly even call that a “leak” as, despite knowing exactly who told Bob Novak Plame’s name, prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald didn’t file any charges for the unlawful distribution of that information. He only charged Scooter Libby for misremembering what he told which reporter a year previous to his grand jury testimony.
McClellan is trying to sell books, and he knows a bit of rhetoric sleight-of-hand will give the media (always hungry for an anti-Bush story) what they want. It’s just sad that it has to come at the expense of the truth.
