Link: The Nation: Scott McClellan = John Dean?.
Link: Did Bush ask Scott McClellan to lie -- or didn't he? | Salon.
Reuters/Jason Reed
White House press secretary Scott McClellan waves to reporters after his final daily briefing in Washington May 5, 2006.
Here is something I never could have predicted, and logically, Valerie Plame and former Ambassador Joe Wilson are likely thankful for it, because material in the new book by the former White House spokesperson, Scott McClellan, appears to reveal the smoking gun that apparently never came out in Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald's grand jury. It is sure to help in their civil suit against Scooter Libby and Karl Rove.
Amazing, isn't it? But as John Nichols points out in The Nation below, John Dean was (and continues to be, imho) amazing in much the same way, an unlikely source of so much insight, yet the kind of source that restores your faith in people of principle, and people who remain unwilling to allow their principles to be compromised, even in the face of persuasion by very powerful forces, forces for whom ethical compromise and corruption appear to be more of a mantra than an expedient exception.
I was saying something on a similar topic to a friend recently. The idea I had (which is neither new nor original, but it just happened to strike me at the time) is this:
We learn nearly everything we need to know about a person when we learn her or his price.
By price, I don't necessarily mean money, but rather, the THING, X, that a person is willing to trade or compromise her or his principles or beliefs in order to get it.
That thing, in other words, is each individual person's 30 pieces of silver. The point at which each of us effectively will "sell out."
Each person's individual Judas Price.
When I was younger, I tended to believe only the worst people had a "Judas Price." As I have gotten older and have seen more behind-the-scenes machinations, have gotten closer to the negotiations of power, what I am astonished to learn, or perhaps in my cynicism am starting to believe, is that every person has a "Judas Price;" it's just a matter of reaching it.
So Scott McClellan and perhaps John Dean publicly have revealed where they haven't hit their Judas Price (well, except perhaps to Nixon, or Bush, because were apparently betrayed by people who put principle ahead of loyalty to them, or by people who were more loyal to some other idea other than backing their bosses with brains unengaged).
But by seeing where these people did not compromise, it shines an even brighter light on the Judas Price of those around them, PARTICULARLY those who eagerly line up to trade off any principle of integrity for Judas Prices that are so very very low.
Yeah, call me naive, but it's the low level of so many people's Judas Prices that still just takes my breath away. And I don't just mean national politicians or sports figures or celebrities. I mean every workplace I've ever been in, every school.
Some people are just corrupted so very easily. Are they even aware that they are negotiating their Judas Price every time they do it? Making Ye Olde Faustian Bargain?
Here's a couple of articles below on what Scott McClellan reveals (and perhaps is now taking back, for a price!) in his new book. For all the time I spent watching him dance in those White House pressers, holding my nose, I'm starting to feel a little more charitable toward the guy who seemed so terribly over his head, so wooden at times as he seemed to struggle with it, struggled more with it than, say, Ari Fleisher, or that new perfectly lighted and hair-styled woman who is the White House spokesperson now (she scares me, her lighting is just so perfect as she utters those absurd things. Geez, bring me back to the old days of Victoria Clark at the Pentagon. She was at least interesting.)
Link: The Nation: Scott McClellan = John Dean? By John Nichols.
Posted 11/21/2007 @ 12:33pm
Scott McClellan = John Dean?
Scott McClellan's admission that he unintentionally made false statements denying the involvement of Karl Rove and Scooter Libby in the Bush-Cheney administration's plot to discredit former Ambassador Joe Wilson, along with his revelation that Vice President Cheney and President Bush were among those who provided him with the misinformation, sets the former White House press secretary as John Dean to George Bush's Richard Nixon.
It was Dean willingness to reveal the details of what described as "a cancer" on the Nixon presidency that served as a critical turning point in the struggle by a previous Congress to hold the 37th president to account.
Now, McClellan has offered what any honest observer must recognize as the stuff of a similarly significant breakthrough.
[...]
What McClellan has revealed, in a section from an upcoming book on his tenure in the Bush-Cheney White House, is a stunning indictment of the president and the vice president. The former press secretary is confirming that Bush and Cheney not only knew that Rove, the administration's political czar, and Libby, who served as Cheney's top aide, were involved in the scheme to attack Wilson's credibility -- by outing the former ambassador's wife, Valerie Plame, as a Central Intelligence Agency analyst -- but that the president and vice president actively engaged in efforts to prevent the truth from coming out.
"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," writes McClellan in an excerpt from his book, What Happened, which is to be published next April by Public Affairs.
"There was one problem," the long-time Bush aide continues. "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."
Much has been made about the fact that outing Plame as a CIA operative was a felony, since knowingly revealing the identity of an intelligence asset is illegal. And much will be made about the fact that McClellan's statement links Bush and Cheney to the cover-up of illegal activities and the obstruction of justice, acts that are themselves felonies.
But it is important to recognize that a bigger issue is at stake. If the president and vice president knowingly participated in a scheme to attack a critic of their administration -- Wilson had revealed that the White House had been informed that arguments Bush and Cheney used for attacking Iraq were ungrounded -- they have committed a distinct sort of offense that the House Judiciary Committee has already determined to be grounds for impeachment.
In the summer of 1974, Democrats and Republicans on the committee voted overwhelmingly to recommend the impeachment of President Richard Nixon for having "repeatedly engaged in conduct violating the constitutional rights of citizens, impairing the due and proper administration of justice and the conduct of lawful inquiries, or contravening the laws governing agencies of the executive branch and the purposed of these agencies."
That second article of impeachment against Nixon detailed the president's involvement in schemes to use the power of his position to attack political critics and then to cover up for those attacks.
[...]
As former Common Cause President Chellie Pingree notes with regard to Bush, "The president promised, way back in 2003, that anyone in his administration who took part in the leak of Plame's name would be fired. He neglected to mention that, according to McClellan, he was one of those people. And needless to say, he didn't fire himself. Instead, he fired no one, stonewalled the press and the federal prosecutor in charge of the case, and lied through his teeth."
Pingree, a savvy government watchdog who is bidding for an open House seat representing her native Maine, argues that the Judiciary Committee must subpoena McClellan as part of a renewed investigation of the Wilson case.
She is right about that.
She is right, as well, when she concludes that, if what McClellan says is true "it will call into question the legitimacy of the entire administration. And we may see a changing of the guard at the White House sooner than expected."
[...]
Link: Did Bush ask Scott McClellan to lie -- or didn't he? | Salon.
Did Bush ask Scott McClellan to lie -- or didn't he?
Former press secretary Scott McClellan says someone in the Bush administration made him spread "false information" about Plame-gate to the press. Time for Congress to ask tough questions.
Editor's note: This article has been updated since it was first published, based on McClellan's publisher's statement here that McClellan's book will not say that Bush knowingly misled him about the Plame leak.
By Joe Conason
Nov. 21, 2007 | Scott McClellan, the former Bush press secretary famed for his robotic stylings, repetitive sophistry and rejection of candor, has at last turned on the powerful men who made him. Evidently he now claims to have grown weary of playing the patsy for their crimes and misdemeanors.
In a short, tantalizing excerpt from his forthcoming memoir posted on the Web site of Public Affairs Press, McClellan complains that he was duped into misleading the public
[...]
McClellan is not the first insider to try to escape disgrace by expressing disappointment, and presumably he won't be the last. All such tittle-tattle comes too late to restore the honor of the confessors or repair the damage done. His book, "What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and What's Wrong With Washington," proffers advice on government and politics that we probably can live without.
By press time today, he had called his own probity into question again, in fact, when his publisher partially retracted the incriminating excerpt in an interview with Bloomberg News. According to Peter Osnos of Public Affairs, McClellan didn't mean to say that Bush deliberately lied to him about Libby's and Rove's involvement in the Plame leak.
"[Bush] told him something that wasn't true, but the president didn't know it wasn't true," said Osnos. "The president told him what he thought to be the case." How McClellan knows what Bush knew at that time -- let alone how Osnos knows -- remains to be explained. (Perhaps the former press secretary would speak more clearly and less cutely under oath, as his predecessor did in the Plame grand jury.)
But despite this apparent stunt, McClellan's recollections have value because he reminds us of important business that Congress has yet to complete: namely, a full investigation of what Bush and Cheney knew about the outing of Plame, a veteran operative working to stop the spread of nuclear weapons, and whether they indeed ordered that reckless act.
[...]
Yet Libby took the fall, leaving Fitzgerald bereft of sufficient evidence to prosecute the crime's suspected mastermind. After Libby was convicted and the president commuted his prison sentence, Bush declared that the case had "run its course" and that he no longer felt bound to find out what his subordinates had done and punish them, as he had initially promised.
The Libby commutation silenced the only potential stool pigeon who could implicate his bosses. Rove resigned without penalty, and Cheney sits in his office, mulling an attack on Iran. The Washington press corps, which had brought so little investigative energy to bear on the Plame case (except to speculate idly and stupidly about whether she was actually a covert officer), accepted Bush's facile closure. So did most members of the new Democratic Congress.
But the damning questions remain unanswered.
Those questions date back to McClellan's first remarks on the subject, when he famously said that the president would dismiss any official determined to be responsible for leaking Plame's identity. "If anyone in this administration was involved in it, they would no longer be in this administration. There's been nothing, absolutely nothing, brought to our attention to suggest any White House involvement." Sworn testimony eventually proved that the leakers included Libby, Rove, former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, and McClellan's predecessor, former press secretary Ari Fleischer. The same raft of evidence also indicated that Cheney orchestrated Libby's leak to New York Times reporter Judith Miller.
Not only did Cheney oversee the activities of his chief of staff, but he actually ordered McClellan to "clear" Libby in a press briefing on the case. A note in Cheney's own handwriting, explaining why he insisted that the White House press staff should defend Libby just as vigorously as Rove, was introduced as an exhibit at trial.
And that note, echoed in the excerpt from McClellan's book, implicated Bush in the coverup.
Cheney's furious scribbling said, "not going to protect one staffer + sacrifice the guy this Pres. asked to stick his head in the meat grinder because of the incompetence of others." The allusion to "incompetence" was a nasty dig at Rove, whom the vice president evidently blamed for the clumsy execution of their conspiracy. Though Cheney had crossed out the words "this Pres." and replaced them with the phrase "that was," his reference to Bush was both legible and incriminating.
What did Cheney mean when he wrote those words? Why did he write that "this Pres." had asked Libby to "stick his head in the meat grinder"? What did Bush know about the extent of the vice president's involvement? When did he discover what Cheney, Libby, Rove and Fleischer had done? Or was he in on the scheme from the beginning?
[...]
Recent Comments