Rush to Plame
Publisher finds fault with reports that Chimpy McRoveCheney admin made McClellan lie:
WASHINGTON - Former White House spokesman Scott McClellan does not believe President Bush lied to him about the role of White House aides I. Lewis Scooter Libby or Karl Rove in the leak of CIA operative Valerie Plame’s identity, according to McClellan’s publisher.
Peter Osnos, the founder and editor-in-chief of Public Affairs Books, which is publishing McClellan’s book in April, tells NBC from his Connecticut home that McCLellan, “Did not intend to suggest Bush lied to him.”
Osnos says when McClellan went before the White House press corps in 2003 to publicly exonerate Libby and Rove, the problem was that his statement was not true. Osnos said the president told McClellan what “he thought to be the case.” But, he says, McClellan believes, “the president didn’t know it was not true.”
Osnos says the quotes which appeared on the Public Affairs Books website were part of the roll out of the book catalogues for the spring printings. And he says McClellan had not finished the manuscript for the memoir yet and was working under deadline to have the book completed for the April publishing.
In an excerpt from his forthcoming book, released Monday on the publisher’s web site, McClellan recounts the 2003 news conference in which he told reporters that aides Karl Rove and I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby were “not involved” in the leak involving operative Valerie Plame.
“There was one problem. It was not true,” McClellan writes, according to a brief excerpt released Monday. “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.”
Topics: Bush
Posted by Jules Crittenden at 8:10 am on Thursday, November 22, 2007
One Response to “Rush to Plame”
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November 22nd, 2007 at 12:14 pm
Let’s take a look at the article… scanning… scanning… nope, just as usual, absolutely no reference to Richard Armitage. You know, the guy that was the real source for Bob Novak’s original article “outing” Valerie Plame? The guy who let everybody twist in the wind for years by not allowing his name to be revealed as the real source of the “leak?” Yeah, that guy.
Of course, Richard Armitage goes down the memory hole, but the writers manage to cut and paste the boilerplate Plame/Wilson accusation against the administration…
“Plame maintains the White House quietly outed her to reporters. Plame and her husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, said the leak was retribution for his public criticism of the Iraq war. The accusation dogged the administration and made Plame a cause celebre among many Democrats.”
…and as usual, allow it to go unchallenged and fail to mention the real source of the “leak.”