Ex-aide: Bush, Cheney
involved
in misleading media
about Plame leak
From the Web,
November 21, 2007
WASHINGTON, Nov. 20 — The
White House is denying a claim in a new book by former White House spokesman
Scott McClellan that top administration officials — including President Bush and
Vice President Dick Cheney — were involved in his "unknowingly" passing along
false information about the involvement of Karl Rove and Lewis "Scooter" Libby
in the leak of a CIA operative's identity.
Amid a burgeoning controversy about the leak of Valerie Plame Wilson's name,
McClellan went to the White House podium in October 2003 and told reporters that
Rove, the president's top political adviser, and Libby, Cheney's chief of staff,
had not been involved.
"There was one problem. It was not true," McClellan writes in his new
book, "What Happened," which is scheduled to be released in April. "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."
Reacting to the release of an excerpt from McClellan's book, which was posted
Tuesday on the Web site of the book's publisher, PublicAffairs, White House
spokesman Scott Stanzel said, "The president has not misled his spokespeople,
nor would he."
The portion of McClellan's book released by PublicAffairs did not give any
specifics about the actions of Bush, Cheney, Libby, Rove or then-Chief of Staff
Andrew Card with regard to McClellan's dissemination of the false information.
There was no immediate comment from McClellan, who served as White House press
secretary from July 2003 until April 2006.
In the excerpt, McClellan writes that "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."
In March, Libby was convicted of perjury and obstruction of justice for lying to
investigators and a federal grand jury about his contacts with reporters
concerning Wilson, the wife of Joe Wilson, a former U.S. ambassador who had
accused the Bush administration of misrepresenting intelligence on Iraqi
dictator Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction in the run-up to the
invasion of Iraq.
Just before Libby was to report to a federal prison in July to serve 30 months
behind bars, Bush commuted his sentence, although the president stopped short of
a full pardon and Libby still had to pay a $250,000 fine.
Rove, who left the White House staff at the end of August, was never charged in
the case. But his lawyer has acknowledged he was one of two sources cited
by syndicated columnist Bob Novak, who first reported that Valerie Plame Wilson
worked for the CIA in the summer of 2003.
Former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage has since acknowledged that he
was Novak's original source for the information that Wilson worked at the CIA,
although he insisted the disclosure was not deliberate and he did not know at
the time she was a covert agent.
Because deliberately leaking a CIA operative's name can be a federal crime, a
special prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald, was appointed to investigate the case.
However, no one was charged in connection with the leak itself; Libby's charges
resulted from statements he made during the investigation.
CCN White House Correspondent Suzanne Malveaux contributed to
this report.
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