News broke this week that former White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan is not only publishing a book on his experiences, but is also adding some insights to the Plame leak scandal. Indeed, his publisher released a six-sentence excerpt, that drew all kinds of attention.
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.
Most media reports interpreted this to mean that McClellan was implicating Bush and Cheney directly in the leak and subsequent cover-up. Joseph Wilson told CNN this morning, “I think it now makes it very clear the extent to which the vice president was involved, which, of course, then makes it very clear how important to the vice president the commutation of Mr. Libby’s sentence was.” Chris Dodd is calling for a renewed Justice Department probe. The political world is abuzz with what McClellan’s revelations really mean.
The problem with the six-sentence excerpt, however, is that’s rather vague. McClellan “unknowingly passed along false information,” but that’s been his line all along. Bush and Cheney were “involved” in his inadvertent falsehoods, but what does “involved” mean, exactly?
Apparently, not nearly as much as White House critics had hoped.
Greg Sargent noticed this key detail from a Bloomberg News report:
McClellan doesn’t suggest that Bush deliberately lied to him about Libby’s and Rove’s involvement in the leak, said Peter Osnos, founder and editor-in-chief of Public Affairs Books, which is publishing McClellan’s memoir next year.
“He told him something that wasn’t true, but the president didn’t know it wasn’t true,” Osnos said in a telephone interview. “The president told him what he thought to be the case.”
In other words, McClellan isn’t going to implicate Bush in the scandal; he’s going to exonerate Bush’s role in the entire fiasco.
The excerpt was just vague enough into the whet the political world’s appetite, but apparently it was a lot like McClellan’s old press briefings — intended to confuse people and obscure the truth.
Even after his departure, McClellan is still finding ways to mislead the media.