“Ideals of candor, transparency and integrity,” ... should outweigh “loyalty to an individual officeholder.” - Scott McClellan

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WASHINGTON — Scott McClellan, President Bush’s former press secretary, told the House Judiciary Committee on Friday that he had been unfairly vilified by Bush supporters for his recent book criticizing former White House colleagues over the Iraq war and their involvement in leaking the identity of an intelligence officer. Mr. McClellan, however, offered little new information in his testimony on those issues beyond what he wrote in the book, “” (PublicAffairs), which was published in May and last week topped the nonfiction best-seller list in The New York Times.

In the book, Mr. McClellan says senior White House officials misled the nation about the reasons for invading Iraq and maneuvered him into lying to the public about their roles in the leak case. The book, with Mr. McClellan’s lacerating criticism of his former colleagues, has generated a rich discussion about the obligations of political loyalty, and his appearance Friday on Capitol Hill provided another stage for that debate. The man who once regularly and seemingly by rote defended Mr. Bush in the White House press room was attacked by the committee’s ranking Republican, Representative Lamar Smith of Texas, who grilled Mr. McClellan as ferociously as any reporter had in his three years as press secretary. Committee Democrats, on the other hand, were much gentler, treating Mr. McClellan as if he were an author promoting a book in an interview.

In his opening statement, Mr. McClellan said that in contemporary Washington politics, “vicious attacks, distortions, political spin become accepted.” He added that “there is no more recent example of this unsavory side of politics than the initial reaction to my book,” in which he said his motives for writing it were unfairly attacked.

He said he wrote the book out of loyalty to the “ideals of candor, transparency and integrity,” which he said should outweigh “loyalty to an individual officeholder.”

Mr. McClellan has seemed especially angry about having been ordered by senior White House officials to tell reporters that I. Lewis Libby Jr., the chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney, had no role in leaking to reporters the name of the intelligence operative, Valerie Wilson. Mr. Libby was subsequently convicted of lying and obstruction of justice for testifying to a grand jury and to investigators that he had not told reporters about Ms. Wilson’s work at the C.I.A. At the Friday hearing, called as part of the Congressional investigation into the leak of Ms. Wilson’s name, Mr. McClellan recalled being ordered by Andrew Card, then the White House chief of staff, to publicly declare that Mr. Libby, known as Scooter, had not been involved in disclosing Ms. Wilson’s identity to reporters.

“I was reluctant to do it,” Mr. McClellan told the committee. “I got on the phone with Scooter Libby and asked him point-blank, ‘Were you involved in this in any way?’ And he assured me in unequivocal terms that he was not.”

In response to a question from Representative John Conyers Jr., Democrat of Michigan, the chairman of the committee, Mr. McClellan said it would be wrong for President Bush to pardon Mr. Libby before his term ends as president. Last year, Mr. Bush commuted Mr. Libby’s sentence, voiding a 30-month prison term.

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Photos courtesy of Doug Mills/The New York Times

Original Source: New York Times

Related Articles:
* at The Public Record;
* House Judiciary Committee Democratic Chairman John Conyers’s opening statement at Congressional Hearing;
* On June 9, Dennis Kucinich read 35 Articles of Impeachment into the record on the House floor for 5 hours.