Political Jackass

From ThinkProgress:

Former White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan will publish a memoir in April titled “What Happened.” In an excerpt posted by his publisher, McClellan implicates “the President himself” in the Valerie Plame scandal:

“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. So 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 senior-most aides in the White House: Karl Rove and Scooter Libby.

“There was one problem. It was not true.

“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.”

McClellan, who orchestrated the White House’s stonewalling of the investigation into the leak, later said he was lied to by those directly involved.

From the outset, as legal experts saw it, the case against I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby was simple — and hard to defend.

When asked by the FBI and later by the grand jury about CIA agent Valerie Plame, Libby said he first learned of her in mid-July of 2003 when NBC reporter Tim Russert told him about her in a phone call.

The problem was that Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff had held a series of meetings and phone conversations during the previous month to talk about Plame and her husband, Iraq war critic Joseph Wilson.

And when Libby was indicted on charges of lying to federal investigators, he and his defense team faced the formidable task of explaining how Libby could have held all those conversations with reporters and government officials, yet claim the key issue had slipped his mind. Read more…