Pacific Free Press was launched in March 2007 by Dutch-Canadian Richard
Kastelein of V.O.F. Expathos, in the Netherlands along with Chris Cook- CFUV radio journalist and Editor in Chief of Pacific Free Press. Cook is based in , Victoria, British Columbia.
The site is a sister to Atlantic Free Press and Brick Ogden an American Expatriate in Amsterdam has been a key supporter of this project.
The mission of Pacific Free Press is simple: to dig out nuggets of truth from
the slag-heap of lies, ignorance and witless diversion that has buried
public discourse today. Pacific Free Press provides a new venue for
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harsh realities too often ignored or distorted by the mainstream press.
Did McClellan Accuse Bush of Lying to Federal Prosecutors?
by Scott Horton Bush press secretary Scott McClellan unleashed a new storm about the Valerie Plame investigation last week. McClellan’s publisher is about to release his new book, What Happened, and he picked what promised to be the juiciest morsel from the work to attract media attention.
McClellan noted that he had “unknowingly passed along false information” that designed to throw investigators off the scent of the Preisdent’s senior political counselor, Karl Rove and Cheney chief of staff Scooter Libby, who were subsequently revealed by the investigation to have been the leakers of the secret identity of a covert CIA agent.
McClellan writes that “five of the highest ranking officials in
the administration. . . Rove, Libby, Cheney, [Andrew] Card, and the
president himself” had been involved in the conspiracy to out the CIA
agent as a petty act of reprisal against her husband for authoring a
New York Times op-ed which laid bare the intentional misstatements
contained in the president’s State of the Union Address concerning a
phony plot by Saddam to secure yellowcake uranium from Niger.
Imagine
a president’s press secretary saying that his boss, the president, lied
in connection with a criminal investigation. The news was sensational,
but it was greeted by the mainstream media with a loud yawn.
In the
meantime, McClellan, who no doubt got a menacing phone call or two
(wouldn’t you like to know the content of those calls?), scrambled to
avert questions about the matter.
McClellan’s publisher, Peter Osnos,
ultimately reversed course, saying that McClellan didn’t believe Bush
had asked him to lie. In the eyes of the American media, the genie had
been put back in the bottle. Scandal? What scandal? There is no story
here. Just move along.
But indeed, lawyers and judges are
trained to look with particular care when an actor on the public stage
makes a statement against his interest. It tends to be true. And there
is every reason to scrutinize the McClellan statements very carefully,
because they stack up very well against the information which emerged
from Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald’s examination.
In
fact, Fitzgerald interviewed President Bush on June 24, 2004, close to
a year after Robert Novak betrayed the identity of Valerie Plame, the
end result of a lengthy White House plot that involved Rove, Libby,
Cheney. . . and President Bush. And on the date of that meeting, Scott
McClellan appeared before the White House press corps and told them of
the meeting without revealing any of its content. The substance of
Bush’s statement to Fitzgerald was revealed only in July 2006 by Murray
Waas:
President Bush told the special prosecutor in the CIA leak
case that he directed [Cheney] to personally lead an effort to counter
allegations made by former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV that his
administration had misrepresented intelligence information to make the
case to go to war with Iraq, according to people familiar with the
president’s interview.
Bush also told federal prosecutors …
that he had directed Cheney, as part of that broader effort, to
disclose highly classified intelligence information that would not only
defend his administration but also discredit Wilson, the sources said.
But
Bush told investigators that he was unaware that Cheney had directed
[Libby] to covertly leak the classified information to the media
instead of releasing it to the public after undergoing the formal
governmental declassification processes.
Bush also said during
his interview with prosecutors that he had never directed anyone to
disclose the identity of then-covert CIA officer Valerie Plame,
Wilson’s wife. Bush said he had no information that Cheney had
disclosed Plame’s identity or directed anyone else to do so.
The
McClellan quote suggests very strongly that the final statement, which
would have been the question that Fitzgerald put to Bush, was false. If
Bush’s statement was a conscious effort to mislead a federal prosecutor
on questions focal to his inquiry, this is a very big deal. Pensito
Review puts the matter this way:
In fact, lying to the feds is a criminal act, even when the person being interviewed is not under oath.
To
cite one recent example of this, in March 2004 Martha Stewart was
sentenced to five months in federal prison for, among other charges,
making false statements to federal investigators. Another more salient
example: In October 2005, Scooter Libby was charged with two counts of
making false statements when interviewed by agents of the FBI, along
with one count of obstruction of justice and two counts of perjury in
testimony to a federal grand jury.
The criminality of lying to
investigators could come into play now if McClellan’s version of what
Bush’s role in the apparent conspiracy differs from what Bush told U.S.
Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald during an Oval Office “interview” — not
under oath — on the morning of June 24, 2004, 11 months after Novak
betrayed Agent Wilson’s identity.
The notion of Bush’s
involvement in the plot to out Valerie Plame has been raised
repeatedly. And it has some basis in the documents that prosecutors
introduced in the Libby trial. Here’s a handwritten note by Dick
Cheney:
The text reads: “not going to protect one staffer
and sacrifice the guy this Pres. asked to stick his head in the meat
grinder because of the incompetence of others.” However, the words
“this Pres.” Have been struck through and replaced with “that was.”
Thus in the original text, Cheney appears to be implicating Bush
directly in a cover-up plan. And so does the McClellan disclosure.
This
is certainly not conclusive evidence that Bush lied to Fitzgerald. But
it provides another basis to suspect that he did. And if he did, his
decision to pardon Scooter Libby has to be seen in an entirely
different light. Bush was using the pardon power to protect himself by
sweeping the entire affair under the carpet.
Public opinion
polling now shows that 64% of Americans believe that Bush has abused
his authority as president, and that 55% believe that his abuses rise
to the level of specific offenses which would justify his impeachment
and removal from office under the Constitutional standards. If
McClellan’s original statement is to be credited, then two of those
impeachable offenses would be making false material statements to a
prosecutor in connection with a criminal investigation and issuing a
pardon as a part of an on-going cover-up of criminal acts. This is a
presidency for the recordbooks.
Writings 
Bush press secretary Scott McClellan unleashed a new storm about the Valerie Plame investigation last week. McClellan’s publisher is about to release his new book, What Happened, and he picked what promised to be the juiciest morsel from the work to attract media attention.
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