McClellan says President Bush was one of five high-ranking
officials who caused McClellan to lie to the public in clearing Bush’s
political adviser Karl Rove and Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of
staff I. Lewis Libby of any responsibility for the leak of Plame’s
employment as an undercover intelligence officer.
“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,” McClellan said. “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’s comments were part of a
press release from his publisher regarding McClellan’s memoir, which is
scheduled to reach the book stores next April.
Though the press
release didn’t add more details about Bush’s role, earlier evidence
already had implicated Bush in the outing of Plame after her husband,
former U.S. Ambassador Joseph Wilson, had gone public in July 2003,
disclosing that Bush had used false information to frighten the
American people about Iraq’s alleged nuclear program.
To
discredit Wilson, Bush administration officials began telling reporters
about Plame’s CIA job to suggest that an early 2002 investigation that
Wilson undertook for the CIA into reports about Iraq seeking yellowcake
uranium from Niger was the result of nepotism.
Though several
reporters balked at blowing Plame’s covert identity, right-wing
columnist Robert Novak revealed it in a column on July 14, 2003. It was
later learned that Novak was relying on information from Deputy
Secretary of State Richard Armitage and his friend, Karl Rove. Libby
and other White House officials had been peddling the same information
to other journalists.
At the time, the smear campaign
represented a classic dirty trick by Bush’s White House, which was
becoming famous for using hard-ball tactics against political
adversaries. However, this time, the collateral damage included the
destruction of a sensitive intelligence network that Plame managed.
CIA Protest
The
case took another serious turn in September when CIA officials, angered
by the damage done to Plame’s spy network, struck back. They lodged a
complaint with the Justice Department that the leaks may have amounted
to an illegal exposure of a CIA officer.
But the initial
investigation was under the control of Attorney General John Ashcroft,
considered a right-wing Bush loyalist. So, the President and other
White House officials confidently denied any knowledge of the leak.
Bush even vowed to fire anyone who had leaked the classified material.
“The
President has set high standards, the highest of standards, for people
in his administration,” McClellan said on Sept. 29, 2003. “If anyone in
this administration was involved in it, they would no longer be in this
administration.”
Bush personally announced his determination to get to the bottom of the matter.
“If
there is a leak out of my administration, I want to know who it is,”
Bush said on Sept. 30. “I want to know the truth. If anybody has got
any information inside our administration or outside our
administration, it would be helpful if they came forward with the
information so we can find out whether or not these allegations are
true.”
Yet, even as Bush was professing his curiosity and
calling for anyone with information to step forward, he was withholding
the fact that he had authorized the declassification of some secrets
about the Niger uranium issue and had ordered Cheney to arrange for
those secrets to be given to reporters.
In other words, though
Bush knew a great deal about how the anti-Wilson scheme got started –
since he was involved in starting it – he uttered misleading public
statements to conceal the White House role.
Also, since the
various conspirators knew that Bush already was in the know, they would
have read his comments as a signal to lie, which is what they did. In
early October, press secretary McClellan said he could report that
political adviser Karl Rove and National Security Council aide Elliott
Abrams were not involved in the Plame leak.
That comment riled
Libby, who feared that he was being hung out to dry. Libby went to his
boss, Dick Cheney, and complained that “they’re trying to set me up;
they want me to be the sacrificial lamb,” Libby’s lawyer Theodore Wells
later said.
Cheney scribbled down his feelings in a note to
press secretary McClellan: “Not going to protect one staffer +
sacrifice the guy the Pres that was asked to stick his head in the meat
grinder because of incompetence of others.”
In the note, Cheney
initially was ascribing Libby’s sacrifice to Bush but apparently
thought better of it, crossing out “the Pres” and putting the clause in
a passive tense. On Oct. 4, 2003, McClellan added Libby to the list of
officials who have “assured me that they were not involved in this.”
So,
Libby had a motive to lie to the FBI when he was first interviewed
about the case. He had gone to the mat with his boss to get his name
cleared in the press, meaning it would make little sense to then admit
involvement to FBI investigators.
“The White House had staked
its credibility on there being no White House involvement in the
leaking of information about Ms. Wilson,” a federal court filing later
noted. For his part, Libby began claiming that he had first learned
about Plame’s CIA identity from NBC’s Washington bureau chief Tim
Russert after Wilson had gone public.
This White House cover-up
might have worked, except in late 2003, Ashcroft recused himself
because of a conflict of interest, and Deputy Attorney General James
Comey picked Patrick Fitzgerald – the U.S. Attorney in Chicago – to
serve as special prosecutor.
Fitzgerald pursued the
investigation far more aggressively. Over the next three-plus years,
the Plame-gate affair would become a slow-growing infection eating away
at White House credibility, despite the best efforts of the President’s
political and media allies to confuse the issue or to shift the blame
onto Wilson.
In October 2005, Fitzgerald indicted Libby on five
counts of lying to federal investigators and obstructing an
investigation. Libby was convicted on four of five counts in March 2007
and sentenced to 30 months in jail, but Bush commuted Libby’s sentence
to spare him any jail time. That also eliminated any incentive for
Libby to turn state’s evidence against Bush and Cheney.
Now,
however, McClellan has become the first White House insider to
acknowledge the original lies that senior administration told about the
Plame-gate affair – and to put the President in the middle of the
cover-up.
The next question might reasonably be: what are the Democrats in Congress going to do about it?
[For more on this topic, see Consortiumnews.com's "
Time to Apologize to Wilson/Plame" or our new book, Neck Deep.]
Writings 
In early fall 2003, George W. Bush joined in what appears to have been a criminal cover-up to conceal the role of his White House in exposing the classified identity of covert CIA officer Valerie Plame Wilson.
Subscribe to this comment's feed
