McClellan - Bush involved in Plame leak

[Donkey®]

Originally Posted by article

November 20, 2007
Ex-aide points finger at Bush for deceit in CIA leak scandal


WASHINGTON (AP) — 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.

The excerpt, posted on the Web site of publisher PublicAffairs, renews questions about what went on in the West Wing and how much Bush and Cheney knew about the leak. For years, it was McClellan's job to field — and often duck — those types of questions.

Now that he's spurring them, answers are equally hard to come by.

White House press secretary Dana Perino said it wasn't clear what McClellan meant in the excerpt and she had no immediate comment. McClellan turned down interview requests Tuesday.

Plame maintains the White House quietly outed her to reporters.

Plame and her husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, said the leak was retribution for his public criticism of the Iraq war. The accusation dogged the administration and made Plame a cause celebre among many Democrats.

McClellan's book, "What Happened," isn't due out until April, and the excerpt released Monday was merely a teaser. It doesn't get into detail about how Bush and Cheney were involved or reveal what happened behind the scenes.

In the fall of 2003, after authorities began investigating the leak, McClellan told reporters that he'd personally spoken to Rove, who was Bush's top political adviser, and Libby, who was Cheney's chief of staff.

"They're good individuals, they're important members of our White House team, and that's why I spoke with them, so that I could come back to you and say that they were not involved," McClellan said at the time.

Both men, however, were involved. Rove was one of the original sources for the newspaper column that identified Plame. Libby also spoke to reporters about the CIA officer and was convicted of lying about those discussions. He is the only person to be charged in the case.

Since that news conference, however, the official White House stance has shifted and it has been difficult to get a clear picture of what happened behind closed doors around the time of the leak.

McClellan's flat denials gave way to a steady drumbeat of "no comment." And Bush's original pledge to fire anyone involved in the leak became a promise to fire anyone who "committed a crime."

In a CNN interview earlier this year, McClellan made no suggestion that Bush knew either Libby or Rove was involved in the leak. McClellan said his statements to reporters were what he and the president "believed to be true at the time based on assurances that we were both given."

Bush most recently addressed the issue in July after commuting Libby's 30-month prison term. He acknowledged that some in the White House were involved in the leak. Then, after repeatedly declining to discuss the ongoing investigation, he said the case was closed and it was time to move on.

At the LEAST he is saying that Bush, Rove, Cheney are responsible for lying about the leak to the public. Too bad Bush and Co. will NEVER be held accountable for this crap...but hey, at least we have Hillary planting questions to distract us!

[Joe_Cool]

Too bad Richard Armitage has fucking ADMITTED that he was the leak. Also too bad "leaking" her name wasn't a crime in the first place.

Damn, am I at a seafood restaurant? With all these red herrings floating around, it's easy to get confused.

[Donkey®]

Originally Posted by Joe_Cool

Too bad Richard Armitage has fucking ADMITTED that he was the leak. Also too bad "leaking" her name wasn't a crime in the first place.

Damn, am I at a seafood restaurant? With all these red herrings floating around, it's easy to get confused.

Yes, it's above Armitage to lie after being told by this administration to do so. Impossible.

[Stylerod]

The story that liberals just won't let die

[Donkey®]

Originally Posted by Stylerod

The story that liberals just won't let die

McClellan is a liberal? This story is on Fox as well...a Liberal news outlet? Guess your comments are invalid.

[garbagemanlb]

Originally Posted by Stylerod

The story that liberals just won't let die

Yeah...because this is coming from a liberal.

[Stylerod]

Originally Posted by Donkey®

McClellan is a liberal? This story is on Fox as well...a Liberal news outlet? Guess your comments are invalid.

McClellan posted this story in LL?

[Donkey®]

Originally Posted by Stylerod

McClellan posted this story in LL?

So you don't deem this "thread worthy?" I'll take note to make sure I contact you next time I have something in the news related to politics to post.

[Stylerod]

Originally Posted by Donkey®

So you don't deem this "thread worthy?" I'll take note to make sure I contact you next time I have something in the news related to politics to post.

I'd appreciate that

[Donkey®]

Originally Posted by Stylerod

I'd appreciate that

I will make sure they are at least equivalent to your Democrat bashing threads or how about the Britney bashing one?

[JaJae]

This story turns out to be false whistleblowing. The publisher has apologized for the confusion that sparked this controversy. It apparently was one line from an advertising excerpt from the unfinished manuscript. The publisher reports that it was vague and misinterpreted.

Publisher: McClellan doesn't believe Bush lied - The White House - MSNBC.com

WASHINGTON - Former White House spokesman Scott McClellan does not believe President Bush lied to him about the role of White House aides I. Lewis Scooter Libby or Karl Rove in the leak of CIA operative Valerie Plame's identity, according to McClellan's publisher.

Peter Osnos, the founder and editor-in-chief of Public Affairs Books, which is publishing McClellan's book in April, tells NBC from his Connecticut home that McCLellan, "Did not intend to suggest Bush lied to him."

Osnos says when McClellan went before the White House press corps in 2003 to publicly exonerate Libby and Rove, the problem was that his statement was not true. Osnos said the president told McClellan what "he thought to be the case." But, he says, McClellan believes, "the president didn't know it was not true."

In the fall of 2003, after authorities began investigating the leak, McClellan told reporters that he'd personally spoken to Rove, who was Bush's top political adviser, and Libby, who was Cheney's chief of staff.

"They're good individuals, they're important members of our White House team, and that's why I spoke with them, so that I could come back to you and say that they were not involved," McClellan said at the time.

For the record it is still true that Armitage was the source of the leak and Fitzgerald knew this.

[JaJae]

Video
McClellan didn't intend to suggest Bush lied - MSNBC Video

[motivez]

It's no surprise that he's now doing a 180 in light of the controversy over his admission.. of course I expect a lot of Republican partisans to believe his new, more Bush-Administration-PR-Friendly account of what happened in the wake of the attention it's gotten, but I just have to

I guess loyalty trumps conscience in Bush's inner circle. Maybe McClellan thought Bush wouldn't come sit on his porch unless he recanted.

"The most powerful leader in the world had called upon me to speak on his behalf and help restore credibility he lost amid the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. So I stood at the White house briefing room podium in front of the glare of the klieg lights for the better part of two weeks and publicly exonerated two of the senior-most aides in the White House: Karl Rove and Scooter Libby.

"There was one problem. It was not true.

"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."

[Joe_Cool]

Originally Posted by motivez

It's no surprise that he's now doing a 180 in light of the controversy over his admission.. of course I expect a lot of Republican partisans to believe his new, more Bush-Administration-PR-Friendly account of what happened in the wake of the attention it's gotten, but I just have to

It's totally surprising to me to see you choosing to blame Bush rather than listen to the words coming directly from the horse's mouth. Really. I had no idea that would happen.

[motivez]

If person says one thing and there is political fallout and controversy over their comments.. and as a result of that political fallout and controversy, the person does a complete 180... I have two options, to believe the original story, or to believe the new story designed to protect former friends and bosses..

Yeah, sorry, I'm not that gullible.

[SoFlaJDM]

Originally Posted by JaJae

Video
McClellan didn't intend to suggest Bush lied - MSNBC Video

you never trust that source... why start now?

[JaJae]

Originally Posted by SoFlaJDM

you never trust that source... why start now?

You always do, why stop now? Do you wish to add anything about the thread subject?

[motivez]

Here's an interesting article about the subject:

"Did McClellan Accuse Bush of Lying to Federal Prosecutors?" by Scott Horton (Harper's Magazine)

Bush press secretary Scott McClellan unleashed a new storm about the Valerie Plame investigation last week. McClellan’s publisher is about to release his new book, What Happened, and he picked what promised to be the juiciest morsel from the work to attract media attention. McClellan noted that he had “unknowingly passed along false information” that designed to throw investigators off the scent of the Preisdent’s senior political counselor, Karl Rove and Cheney chief of staff Scooter Libby, who were subsequently revealed by the investigation to have been the leaker of the secret identity of a covert CIA agent. McClellan writes that “five of the highest ranking officials in the administration. . . Rove, Libby, Cheney, [Andrew] Card, and the president himself” had been involved in the conspiracy to out the CIA agent as a petty act of reprisal against her husband for authoring a New York Times op-ed which laid bare the intentional misstatements contained in the president’s State of the Union Address concerning a phony plot by Saddam to secure yellowcake uranium from Niger.

Imagine a president’s press secretary saying that his boss, the president, lied in connection with a criminal investigation. The news was sensational, but it was greeted by the mainstream media with a loud yawn. In the meantime, McClellan, who no doubt got a menacing phone call or two (wouldn’t you like to know the content of those calls?), scrambled to avert questions about the matter. McClellan’s publisher, Peter Osnos, ultimately reversed course, saying that McClellan didn’t believe Bush had asked him to lie. In the eyes of the American media, the genie had been put back in the bottle. Scandal? What scandal? There is no story here. Just move along.
But indeed, lawyers and judges are trained to look with particular care when an actor on the public stage makes a statement against his interest. It tends to be true. And there is every reason to scrutinize the McClellan statements very carefully, because they stack up very well against the information which emerged from Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald’s examination.

In fact, Fitzgerald interviewed President Bush on June 24, 2004, close to a year after Robert Novak betrayed the identity of Valerie Plame, the end result of a lengthy White House plot that involved Rove, Libby, Cheney. . . and President Bush. And on the date of that meeting, Scott McClellan appeared before the White House press corps and told them of the meeting without revealing any of its content. The substance of Bush’s statement to Fitzgerald was revealed only in July 2006 by Murray Waas:

President Bush told the special prosecutor in the CIA leak case that he directed [Cheney] to personally lead an effort to counter allegations made by former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV that his administration had misrepresented intelligence information to make the case to go to war with Iraq, according to people familiar with the president’s interview.

Bush also told federal prosecutors … that he had directed Cheney, as part of that broader effort, to disclose highly classified intelligence information that would not only defend his administration but also discredit Wilson, the sources said.

But Bush told investigators that he was unaware that Cheney had directed [Libby] to covertly leak the classified information to the media instead of releasing it to the public after undergoing the formal governmental declassification processes.

Bush also said during his interview with prosecutors that he had never directed anyone to disclose the identity of then-covert CIA officer Valerie Plame, Wilson’s wife. Bush said he had no information that Cheney had disclosed Plame’s identity or directed anyone else to do so.

The McClellan quote suggests very strongly that the final statement, which would have been the question that Fitzgerald put to Bush, was false. If Bush’s statement was a conscious effort to mislead a federal prosecutor on questions focal to his inquiry, this is a very big deal. Pensito Review puts the matter this way:

In fact, lying to the feds is a criminal act, even when the person being interviewed is not under oath.

To cite one recent example of this, in March 2004 Martha Stewart was sentenced to five months in federal prison for, among other charges, making false statements to federal investigators. Another more salient example: In October 2005, Scooter Libby was charged with two counts of making false statements when interviewed by agents of the FBI, along with one count of obstruction of justice and two counts of perjury in testimony to a federal grand jury.

The criminality of lying to investigators could come into play now if McClellan’s version of what Bush’s role in the apparent conspiracy differs from what Bush told U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald during an Oval Office “interview” — not under oath — on the morning of June 24, 2004, 11 months after Novak betrayed Agent Wilson’s identity.

The notion of Bush’s involvement in the plot to out Valerie Plame has been raised repeatedly. And it has some basis in the documents that prosecutors introduced in the Libby trial. Here’s a handwritten note by Dick Cheney:

The text reads: “not going to protect one staffer and sacrifice the guy this Pres. asked to stick his head in the meat grinder because of the incompetence of others.” However, the words “this Pres.” Have been struck through and replaced with “that was.” Thus in the original text, Cheney appears to be implicating Bush directly in a cover-up plan. And so does the McClellan disclosure.

This is certainly not conclusive evidence that Bush lied to Fitzgerald. But it provides another basis to suspect that he did. And if he did, his decision to pardon Scooter Libby has to be seen in an entirely different light. Bush was using the pardon power to protect himself by sweeping the entire affair under the carpet.

Public opinion polling now shows that 64% of Americans believe that Bush has abused his authority as president, and that 55% believe that his abuses rise to the level of specific offenses which would justify his impeachment and removal from office under the Constitutional standards. If McClellan’s original statement is to be credited, then two of those impeachable offenses would be making false material statements to a prosecutor in connection with a criminal investigation and issuing a pardon as a part of an on-going cover-up of criminal acts. This is a presidency for the recordbooks.