“Scott McClellan Has Shown No Proof Of Bush ‘Shading The Truth’” - With Video
Related: Bob Dole Goes Berserk On “Miserable Creature” Scott McClellan
Karl Rove, the “architect” of President Bush’s elections, comes in for some post-Modernist criticism in Scott McClellan’s hot new book, What Happened. The former press secretary writes of a political genius who pursued political art like a science and pressed the craft of politicking to the legal limits.
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“Within the Bush administration, Rove’s controlling personality and substantial influence over policy, strategy, political communications and message expanded unchecked,” McClellan writes. “Rove likes to have his hands in just about everything, relishing policy shaping as much as political strategizing… He occupied a key seat at the center of both in Bush’s White House.
“Karl also has a reputation as a ruthtless, perhaps unscrupulous operator, and has always struck me as the kind of person who would be willing, in the heat of battle, to push the envelope to the limit of what is permissible ethically or legally,” writes McClellan, who served as White House press secretary from 2003 to 2006 and has now published a book about the Bush administration’s purported deception of the public in the selling of the war in Iraq and in the defense of it when a tough war-critic emerged.
The “political propaganda machine” of the White House was relentless in “shading the truth” about intelligence supporting the U.S.-led invasion, McClellan writes, and Rove misled him personally about his own involvement in any talks with reporters about the identity of CIA operative Valerie Plame after her husband, Joe Wilson, publicly criticized the White House for manipulating intelligence.
Yet Rove “was specifically excluded from National Security Council war meetings,” he writes. And so was McClellan, in a White House which he describes as “compartmental” and secretive, even with some of its own highest-level people.
Rove, for his part, maintains that McClellan lacks the real inside track and the insight to support his “sweeping assertions” about the administration’s propaganda machine.
“The biggest thing about this book that troubles me is that he makes these wide sweeping assertions and then provides no evidence,” Rove told Bill O’Reilly on FOX News’ The O’Reilly Report. This includes “the most important one, which is the assertion that the president went into Iraq by misleading the American people with a propaganda effort with deception, you know, shading the truth.”
“Every major intelligence agency in the world thought that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction,” Rove said. “So the suggestion, which Scott provides no evidence for, that somehow or another the information or the material or the intelligence was dummied up in 2002 is simply incorrect.”
As for Rove’s involvement in the Plame case: “Aas we now know, the identity of Valerie Plame was leaked to Robert Novak by Richard Armitage (deputy secretary of state under Colin Powell). What I told Scott was I didn’t know her name, didn’t reveal her name, didn’t reveal — didn’t know what she did at the CIA, and that I wasn’t the source for the leak. And we now know Richard Armitage was the source.”
But Rove had talked about her with reporters, right?
“When Robert Novak tells me about a conversation about what he knows about Valerie Plame, I say to him, from my recollection, I say I’ve heard that, too,” Rove told O’Reilly. “From his recollection, it was, so you’ve heard that, too. And that was the extent of the conversation.” He also spoke with Matt Cooper of Time magazine, but contends that he never divulged Plame’s identity to anyone.”
Rove, of course, survived the federal investigation that led to the conviction of Lewis “Scooter” Libby, the vice president’s chief of staff, for obstruction of justice in the probe of the Plame leak. Rove has survived the White House as well, ensconced in a private consultancy in Washington. Still, he suggests, he remains an easy mark for reporters - and for what he calls the unsubstantiated reporting of McClellan.
“I hate to be a little cynical about this, but again, you know, for about five months, I had news organizations camped out in front of my house when they thought I did it and that something bad was going to happen to me. When it came out that nothing bad was going to happen to me and that the person who had leaked the name to Robert Novak was Richard Armitage, all of a sudden, those news crews went away.”
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