McClellan admission evokes memories of Nixon era

McClellan admission evokes memories of Nixon era

By DeWayne Wickham

This trail is starting to look familiar. When an excerpt from the soon-to-be-released book by former presidential press secretary Scott McClellan revealed that President Bush and Vice President Cheney instructed him to tell journalists that top White House aides played no role in the outing of Valerie Plame Wilson, I had an eerie feeling that the nation had been down this path before.

In discussing a 2003 press briefing during which he told reporters that Karl Rove, the president's political adviser, and Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Vice President Cheney's chief of staff, had nothing to do with the leak, McClellan says he was misled.

"There was one problem," he wrote of what he told journalists that day. "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 (Andrew Card) and the president himself," McClellan writes.

This blurb from What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and What's Wrong with Washington, is posted on the website of its publisher, Public Affairs Books.

We now know that Plame Wilson's identity as a CIA undercover operative was leaked to reporters by at least two Bush administration officials, Libby and then-deputy secretary of State Richard Armitage. The Bush administration did so to undermine the credibility of her husband, Joseph Wilson, a former ambassador who was sent to Niger by the CIA to determine whether Saddam Hussein was trying to buy a nuclear weapons component from the African nation. After his trip, Wilson concluded that this charge wasn't true and publicly criticized Bush for making such an unsubstantiated claim one of his rationales for invading Iraq. The White House responded by leaking Plame Wilson's identity and suggesting that Wilson's trip was a junket arranged by his wife.

In March, Libby was convicted of obstruction of justice, lying to a grand jury and to FBI agents investigating the leak of Plame Wilson's identity. Libby was sentenced to 30 months in prison, but Bush commuted his prison time.

The seedy path taken by Bush's aides looks a lot like one taken by another White House.

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http://www.usatoday.com/printedition/news/20071127/opcomtues.art0.htm

to him. Dana's claim is worth at least as much as Nixon's.