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McClellan points finger at Bush, Rove

By MIKE ALLEN & MICHAEL CALDERONE | 11/20/07 1:05 PM EST
Updated: 11/21/07 7:34 AM EST

Former White House press secretary Scott McClellan names names in a caustic passage from a forthcoming memoir that accuses President Bush, Karl Rove and Vice President Cheney of being "involved" in his giving the press false information about the CIA leak case.

McClellan’s publisher released three paragraphs from the book “WHAT HAPPENED: Inside the Bush White House and What’s Wrong With Washington.”

The excerpts give no details about the alleged involvement of the president or vice president.

But McClellan lists five top officials as having allowed him inadvertently to mislead the public.

“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 seniormost aides in the White House: Karl Rove and Scooter Libby,” McClellan wrote.

“There was one problem. It was not true.”

McClellan then absolves himself and makes an inflammatory — and potentially lucrative for his publisher — charge.

“I had unknowingly passed along false information,” McClellan wrote.
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“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 says he was in that position because he trusted the president: "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.”

Shortly after news of the McClellan excerpt broke, Politico caught up with Judith Miller and Matthew Cooper, two reporters who received information about Valerie Plame’s identity and were caught up in the subsequent legal proceedings.

“You’re only as good as your sources,” Miller, who was a reporter at the New York Times when the imbroglio broke, said with a mischievous laugh.

Miller, now an adjunct fellow at the Manhattan Institute, spent 85 days in jail by not revealing her source. “Nothing surprises me about Washington during this administration anymore,” she said.

Cooper, who was a White House correspondent for Time magazine and is now the Washington bureau chief of Portfolio magazine, said he “was always frustrated that Rove and Libby misled McClellan.”

“I’m glad McClellan is, too,” Cooper said.

McClellan, who is still writing the book, declined to comment further.

In recent conversations and in his many public speaking engagements, McClellan has made it clear he retains great affection for the president.

But White House sources have long said that Rove and I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, the vice president’s chief of staff, allowed McClellan to suggest day after day that they had no involvement in the publication of the name of CIA operative Valerie Plame.

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