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Ex-White House spokesman Scott McClellan attacks Bush in his new book
Long considered among the most loyal of Bush’s assistants, McClellan writes that the president was ‘not open and forthright’ about the Iraq war. The White House is shocked by the lashing.
By James Gerstenzang and Johanna Neuman
Los Angeles Times Staff Writers

1:21 PM PDT, May 28, 2008

WASHINGTON — The White House is reeling today over the unexpected lashing it is taking from a former loyalist brought to Washington from Texas to make history as a proud member of George W. Bush’s administration.

Scott McClellan, who was on the podium as press secretary during both the Iraq war and Hurricane Katrina, rips the administration in a new book, saying the president was “not open and forthright” about the war and that the administration was relying on “propaganda” and “manipulating” public opinion in the run-up to war.

“I’m really stumped,” former press secretary Ari Fleischer, once McClellan’s boss, said on MSNBC. “If he had these misgivings in 2002 . . . why did he take the job, if he thought it was propaganda?” He added: “Something doesn’t add up in the writing of this book.”

Officially, White House Press Secretary Dana Perino called McClellan’s disclosures “sad” and “puzzling,” and added: “This is not the Scott we knew.”

Shock filtered from Bush White House alumni all day long.

“For him to do this now strikes me as self-serving, disingenuous and unprofessional,” Fran Townsend, former head of the White House-based counterterrorism office, told CNN.

And political guru Karl Rove, one of the targets of McClellan’s wrath, told Fox News: “If he had these moral qualms, he should have spoken up about them. And frankly, I don’t remember him speaking up about these things. I don’t remember a single word.”

In the book, “What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception,” McClellan writes about the case that led to the conviction of I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney’s former chief of staff, for leaking the identity of a CIA operative.

The former press secretary, whose service with Bush dates back to the president’s second gubernatorial term in Texas, writes that he was led by senior officials into providing assurances from the White House press briefing room podium that Karl Rove, Elliott Abrams and Libby were not involved in leaking classified information.

The case grew out of the disclosure of the identity of a CIA operative, Valerie Plame Wilson. Libby was eventually convicted in the case; in July, President Bush commuted Libby’s 30-month sentence for perjury and obstruction.

Rove, Bush’s top political advisor, and Abrams, a national security aide, were not charged in the case.

“There was only one problem” with the assurances he provided, McClellan wrote. “What I’d said 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, Vice President Cheney, the president’s chief of staff, Andrew Card, and the president himself.”

The former spokesman said he did not learn that his statements were untrue for almost two years; nor, he said, did he think Bush knew they were untrue, having been deceived by others.

The deception, he wrote, reflected “an administration that, too often, chose in defining moments to employ obfuscation and secrecy rather than honesty and candor.”

The disclosure comes from a former White House aide who was long considered among the most loyal of Bush’s assistants, one of the young campaign workers who had joined the Bush team before the then-governor declared his presidential intentions and who arrived in Washington, D.C., only in December 2000, after Bush was declared the presidential winner over Al Gore.

McClellan presents deception as a central theme of the book — and of his experience working just yards from the Oval Office — but argues that the habit of lying is not limited to the Valerie Plame Wilson case or even to the Bush White House.

Rather, he writes, “it permeates our national political discourse. And while much of the deceit has been incidental and has not been embraced consciously by our elected leaders, it has become an accepted way of winning the partisan wars for public opinion and an increasingly destructive part of Washington’s culture.”

He said he had placed “great hope” in Bush as a agent to change that culture.

“He chose not to do so,” McClellan writes, adding: “Instead, his own White House became embroiled in political maneuvering that was equally unsavory, if not worse” than that of the Bill Clinton White House. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

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