McClellan points finger at Bush, Rove

[andophiroxia]

Former White House press secretary Scott McClellan names names in a caustic passage from a forthcoming memoir that accuses President Bush, Karl Rove and Vice President Cheney of being "involved" in his giving the press false information about the CIA leak case.

McClellan’s publisher released three paragraphs from the book “WHAT HAPPENED: Inside the Bush White House and What’s Wrong With Washington.”

The excerpts give no details about the alleged involvement of the president or vice president.

But McClellan lists five top officials as having allowed him inadvertently to mislead the public.

“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 seniormost aides in the White House: Karl Rove and Scooter Libby,” McClellan wrote.

“There was one problem. It was not true.”

McClellan then absolves himself and makes an inflammatory — and potentially lucrative for his publisher — charge.

“I had unknowingly passed along false information,” McClellan wrote.
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“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."

McClellan says he was in that position because he trusted the president: "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.”
Shortly after news of the McClellan excerpt broke, Politico caught up with Judith Miller and Matthew Cooper, two reporters who received information about Valerie Plame’s identity and were caught up in the subsequent legal proceedings.

“You’re only as good as your sources,” Miller, who was a reporter at the New York Times when the imbroglio broke, said with a mischievous laugh.

Miller, now an adjunct fellow at the Manhattan Institute, spent 85 days in jail by not revealing her source. “Nothing surprises me about Washington during this administration anymore,” she said.

Cooper, who was a White House correspondent for Time magazine and is now the Washington bureau chief of Portfolio magazine, said he “was always frustrated that Rove and Libby misled McClellan.”

“I’m glad McClellan is, too,” Cooper said.

Source here.

Now, I wanted to confront this to get new information and to see what people are thinking about this and what's been revealed. I know some people are going, "Well he did lie, his aide says so." What differs from Bush from the likes of Clinton, is that Clinton did fabricate evidence of the 'tens of thousands' in mass graves in Kosovo, when they were only a few thousand. Also, I have heard that there weren't that many of them (mind you it's still horrible, but at the same time I cannot help but think why would he need to lie about such things), along with having FBI files on the opposing side at that moment. (I believe it was Republican senators and representatives.) Bush went through the legal means and still gets crap.

Honestly, I am tired of this. You have people releasing information to the enemy and they're allowed to walk freely about while more innocent people (they profess to save) and our soldiers die as a result of this information. I've just about had it honestly. Now, I'm not saying our President is perfect, nor this war fought perfectly, and neither have I agreed with him on a lot of issues or his handling at times. I am just getting sick and tired that they seem to think that this is JUST like Vietnam and they are either oblivious to the blood on their hands as well from that war as well as now. It's just common sense. I am so tired of this overrationalization of what is right and wrong and it seems that everyone is following goals in a selfish manner.

[politicalboy]

By November this will be long gone, as inapropriate of an act as it was by the former Press Secretary. After all, Plame was just a coffee runner, so too speak.

[UB_S]

They are calling this the revenge of a disgruntled employee...