NightBlogger

BEN FELLER
Associated Press
President Bush broke his promise to the country by refusing to fire aide Karl Rove for leaking a CIA agent’s identity, said Scott McClellan, the president’s chief spokesman for almost three years.

“I think the president should have stood by his word and that meant Karl should have left,” McClellan said Sunday in a broadcast interview about his new tell-all book, a scathing rebuke of the White House under Bush’s leadership. McClellan now acknowledges he felt burned by Rove, Bush’s top political adviser, and I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney’s former chief of staff. He said Rove and Libby assured him they were not involved in leaking CIA operative Valerie Plame’s identity, and he repeated those assurances to reporters.

In fact, Rove and Libby did help leak Plame’s identity, as confirmed in a later criminal investigation. Libby had resigned by then, but Rove remained in office and eventually stepped down on his terms in August 2007. 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