NightBlogger

WASHINGTON (AP) - A House committee chairman said Tuesday he is seeking more documents from the CIA leak probe because of significant disclosures to the FBI by Vice President Dick Cheney’s former chief of staff and new details about Cheney’s role in the scandal in a book by a former White House press secretary.

The request to the Justice Department by Rep. Henry Waxman follows a review of edited FBI reports and publication of a book by President Bush’s former spokesman Scott McClellan, who has said he was misled by others, possibly including Cheney, about the role of I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby in leaking CIA operative Valerie Plame’s identity.

Waxman, D-Calif., sent a letter to the Justice Department after learning that Libby, Cheney’s former top aide, told the FBI that it’s possible he was instructed by Cheney to disseminate information to the press about Plame, the wife of Bush administration war critic Joseph Wilson. More

Raw Story
IN SCOTT McClellan’s recent statements to the press regarding his apostasy, he says that one of the things that pushed him over the edge was the revelation on April 6, 2006, that President Bush had secretly authorized the selective release to reporters of classified information, something that both the president and his then-spokesman McClellan had been vigorously condemning in their public statements about the Valerie Plame leak case.

“I walk onto Air Force One and a reporter had yelled a question to the president trying to ask him a question about this revelation that had come out during the [Libby] legal proceedings,” McClellan told the Today Show’s Meredith Viera on Thursday morning. “The revelation was that it was the president who had authorized, or enabled, Scooter Libby to go out there and talk about this information. And I told the president that that’s what the reporter was asking. He was saying that you, yourself, were the one that authorized the leaking of this information. And he said, ‘Yeah, I did.’ And I was kinda taken aback.” More