Did McClellan Accuse Bush of Lying to Federal Prosecutors?

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.