Didn't last long at his job.
Posted on 11/21/2007 9:36:15 AM PST by ConservativeMajority
The publicist for a book written by former White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan released an excerpt on Monday that set all of the Old Media tongues to wagging again about the Valerie Plame Affair:
"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."
This tantalizing bit seemed to have the intended effect judging from the volume and trajectory of spittle emanating from the mouth of MSNBC’s Chris Matthews. Visions of the Fitzmas that never came surely danced in the heads of David Shuster and Keith Olbermann. Democratic Sen. Chris Dodd predictably recited the Watergate mantra, calling on the new Attorney General to launch an investigation to determine the extent of any cover up and “what the President knew and when he knew it."
However, something tells me that the three paragraphs “cherry-picked” from the manuscript were meant to convey something that succeeding paragraphs would qualify and perhaps mitigate. Consider McClellan’s own public statements from an interview with Larry King on March 6, 2007, after Scooter Libby was convicted of perjury and obstruction of justice:
KING: Scott, were you lied to?
MCCLELLAN: Well, Larry, I said what I believed to be true at the time. It was also what the president believed to be true at the time based on assurances that we were both given.
That directly contradicts the conclusion many have drawn from the excerpt released Monday.
Later in the same interview, McClellan responded to the allegation that the White House sought to gain from ‘outing’ Valerie Plame:
Well, Larry, remember that the person was the one who was the original or primary source for Robert Novak, the column that started this whole investigation really was Dick Armitage, who was the deputy secretary of State, not really a proponent of the Iraq war. And it was certainly not a partisan gun-slinger as Robert Novak said in his article or said later in an interview. In terms of any other involvement beyond that, what came out in this trial is what I learned for the first time. So I don't know of any effort beyond what we have seen in this trial come out in the media that was going on. I think one of the questions that this gets to is, was the administration trying to discredit or retaliate against a critic? I would say that the administration was trying to set the record straight. Whether or not people were involved in leaking someone's name and that name was classified, that's a different matter. I don't know anything about that.
McClellan indicated that his entire knowledge of the ‘outing’ of Valerie Plame from both his personal knowledge and the public record was complete at this point, yet did not make any claim that high-ranking officials sent him out to “pass false information” about it. McClellan’s meaning in the book excerpt is murky at best and does not necessarily contradict the definitive statements he made to Larry King.
While the pundits parse, let’s review the facts:
1. Valerie Plame was not a covert agent at the time Robert Novak published her name and therefore no crime was committed in releasing her name.
2. Richard Armitage was Novak’s source for the information, not Karl Rove or Scooter Libby.
3. Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald knew that Armitage was Novak’s source at the beginning of his investigation and found no evidence to suggest that anyone at the White House was involved in giving Valerie Plame’s name to the press to retaliate against Joe Wilson.
The extreme bias of the Old Media is well illustrated by the news reporting of this latest rehash. Matthews, Shuster and Olbermann and their ilk are quick to promote the idea that Bush not only lied about Valerie Plame, but engaged in a covered up. Yet all of them refuse to acknowledge that Joe Wilson is a proven liar. I was the only White House reporter to get the Valerie Plame story right. I confronted Wilson in 2003 about his deception about how he came to be sent on the mission to Niger and the Senate Intel Committee confirmed it a year later. The truth was that Vice President Dick Cheney did not send Wilson to Niger, but that his wife played a role in it. Wilson claimed that he “debunked” a possible connection between Saddam Hussein and Niger to acquire uranium, but his CIA debriefers believed that Wilson’s report tended to support it.
In my book, “The Great Media War: A Battlefield Report”, I refer to the Valerie Plame Affair as “The Big Nothing” since the entire ordeal was a media-generated “scandal” perpetuated in the absence of fact by the crass politicization of the legal process. Wilson and Plame have already been exposed as attention-hungry frauds that deserve to be scorned or ignored. The more important discussion at hand is the Old Media’s willingness to exclude facts that do not fit the scenario they are trying to advance. Objectivity is not even at issue, as the discussion of bias is well beyond the question of whether or not it exists.
The Valerie Plame Affair is a shameful example of reporters and news organizations deliberately misleading citizens in order to affect a political outcome. Before the rise of the New Media, such operations could be accomplished with a high expectation of success, since opposing viewpoints and contradictory evidence could be kept away from the public. However, the Old Media continues to follow the same playbook, without realizing the field of battle has leveled. From Jayson Blair’s fabrications to Dan Rather’s phony documents to Hillary Clinton’s planted questions, the Old Media and their ideological soulmates on the left will get tripped up with greater frequency if they fail to adjust to the realities of the New Media.
Who injected McClellan with the Lib juice?
His mother?
The writer suggests that thinking McClellan is ratting out Bush, et al. is premature.
Scott McClellan’s career, before working at the White House, consisted of working for his mother or friends of his mother. From Wikepedia:
[After graduating from The University of Texas at Austin, where he was president of the Sigma Phi Epsilon Texas Alpha Chapter, McClellan was the three-time campaign manager for his mother (a Democrat), former Texas Comptroller Carole Keeton Strayhorn. In addition, he worked on political grassroots efforts and was the Chief of Staff to a Texas State Senator. . .Karen Hughes, Governor Bush’s communications director, hired him to be Bush’s deputy press secretary.]
Scott wrote the book so he would have enough money to move out of his parents’ house.
Didn't last long at his job.
His boyfriend, Shep Smith.
CORRECTION: "The entire ordeal was a CIA/media-generated scandal, etc."
MSNBC will be talking about this for the next two weeks. Everytime you think this Plame story is dead, someone resurrects it.
Isn’t he from a Democratic family? IIRC, his father was invovled with LBJ.
Scott McClelland was in way over his head as Bush's press secretary. He had that deer caught in the headlights look ... the WH press corps had him flummoxed. Bush kept him around longer than he should have out of a sense of loyalty to a fellow Texan, especially in light of the fact Karen Hughes had hired him initially.
His Mommy was an Independent candidate for Governor in 06.
This article has a nice spin to it.
I always thought the Valerie Plame affair was crap because Plame posed on the cover of a national magazine, with sunglasses and scarf, before she was “outed”. The question remains, though, why did Bush allow it to last so long? Perhaps to allow the media to have a feeding frenzy to deflect bad news from Iraq at the time? I suppose this could have helped the war in Iraq but I’m not exactly sure.
Are you talking about Scott McClellan or Jeff Gannon?
I knew Scott in my days at UT Austin in 1986 when his mommy was running for Congress. Scott would work his mom’s Campaign Table on the West Mall and get into arguments with Young Democrats and lose.
When Bush named him to be his press spokesman I laughed and then I became very concerned.
It looks like Gannon got it right. McClellan’s publisher came out and said that Scottie didn’t indicate Bush lied.
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