White House press secretary Scott McClellan held a media briefing yesterday, as he does every Monday, and dealt with a number of questions about — you guessed it — the Plame Game scandal.
There weren’t a lot of fresh revelations, much to no one’s surprise, but McClellan did offer one comment that I enjoyed.
“The subject of this investigation is whether someone leaked classified information,” McClellan said. “That’s what this is about. And there are some that are trying — some that see this as a political opportunity to attack the White House, and so they’re talking about all sorts of other issues. The issue here is a very serious matter, and it needs to be pursued to the fullest, and we want to get to the bottom of it.”
Now putting aside for the moment that the White House really has no interest in seriously “getting to the bottom” of the controversy, McClellan is absolutely correct about what this scandal is all about. Plain and simple: someone illegally leaked classified information and now the White House is under criminal investigation.
I have to admit it was a pleasant surprise to hear McClellan sum it up so perfectly. Sure, he criticized political opportunists, and that’s fine. But he honestly described the scandal as “a very serious matter.”
I think the surprise is that this approach is completely inconsistent with the defenses offered by other Republicans and ideological supporters of the president. In fact, far from considering the controversy as a “very serious matter,” Bush sycophants have been arguing the opposite. Rush Limbaugh said last week that the scandal is a “non-story” in which Democrats will “open the door right into their nose again.” TV preacher and Bush cheerleader Pat Robertson was on TV yesterday asking, “[W]hat’s the big deal?”
McClellan, perhaps unintentionally, was undermining the rhetoric of the White House’s political supporters by explaining that this is a very big deal.
The McClellan remark also helps remind people to ignore extraneous side issues that other conservatives are furiously trying to work into the story to distract people away from the central point. Over the last week, conservatives have done their best to turn attention towards anything but the illegal leaks — including reports on as Joseph Wilson’s alleged partisanship, Wilson’s hair, media bias, Plame’s status as a CIA agent, partisanship in Congress, and the timing of the revelation.
McClellan cut through all of this needless rhetoric to remind us what the real story is all about: an illegal leak and a White House criminal investigation.
As Kos put it yesterday:
1. Plame is an undercover CIA agent.
2. She was outed by senior administration officials in the White House.
3. Outing a CIA agent is a felony.
Everything else is beside the point.