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
Eye To Eye With Katie Couric: Scott McClellan (CBS News)
Couric shamelessly defends press complicity and focus on rushing to war instead of questioning White House motives. She cites Colin Powell’s bogus UN speech as justification for the press being deceived. During war governments lie! Even a fifth grader knows that. Proof the so-called liberal press relied exclusively on Pentagon sources for prewar news at the exclusion of all other avenues of information. Democracy Now
Former White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan took to the airwaves Thursday to explain his speaking out on his former bosses in the Bush administration. In a new memoir, McClellan accuses the administration of deliberately manipulating the public to wage the war on Iraq. McClellan also criticizes his former bosses for the handling of Hurricane Katrina and the CIA leak case. Appearing on the Today Show, McClellan said he had mistakenly allowed his personal admiration for President Bush to overshadow concerns about the deceptive rush to war in Iraq.
Scott McLellan:
“I felt like we were rushing into this, but because of my position and my affection for the President and my belief and trust in he and his advisers, I gave them the benefit of the doubt. And looking back on it and reflecting on it now, I don’t think I should have.”
McClellan went on to say President Bush had personally told him he authorized the leak of former CIA operative Valerie Plame’s identity. McClellan says he asked President Bush aboard Air Force One if he was the one who approved outing Plame to the media. McClellan says Bush replied, “Yes, I was.”
“While Katie Couric impressively argued that the media did fail to do its job — pointing out that the White House threatened networks which were perceived to be too critical with cutting off access to the war and that anyone who questioned the war was deemed unpatriotic and all of that “affected the level of aggressiveness that was exercised by the media” — the painfully empty-headed Charlie Gibson and the mindlessly establishment-defending Brian Williams both insisted that the media did a perfectly fine job and that they would do nothing different.”
Chris Matthews whines about how the press was manipulated by Bush and White House instead of admitting the media didn’t do their job. Journalists can’t be manipulated if they’re objectively reporting the news instead of serving as government stenographers.
SilentPatriot crooksandliars
Although Scott McClellan’s memoir is chock full of juicy bits about George Bush, Karl Rove, Scooter Libby and the myriad pre-war lies the White House force-fed America, perhaps the most important (and most overlooked) critique McClellan levels is aimed squarely at the “liberal media” and how they acted as “deferential, complicit enablers” of the administration’s “propaganda” leading up to the war. On the TODAY show this morning, Matt Lauer asked “the big three” — Charlie Gibson, Brian Williams and Katie Couric — whether they thought McClellan was accurate in his criticism of the press. Their answers are revealing to say the least. [Throw in Chris Matthews, Larry King and Wolf Blitzer; they all did the Brian Williams thing].
To her credit, Couric admits that mistakes were made and that she could have done a better job vetting the administration’s claims; although she also admitted that the White House threatened to cut off her access after she filed critical reports. But Gibson and Williams (along with, one would assume, the majority of the elite press) simply lack the ability to recognize that they were duped, and that they thus duped their viewers. Indeed, as Glenn documents in a lengthy post today:
“This is why most establishment journalists will never be convinced that they failed to do their job, no matter how much evidence is presented: because of the understanding they have of what ‘their job’ actually is.” More
