Telegraph UK: George Bush 'Misled Public Over Spy Leak'

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml;jsessionid=QOVSWP5SDBWOTQFIQMGCFF4AVCBQUIV0?xml=/news/2007/11/22/wbush122.xml

George Bush 'misled public over spy leak'
By Toby Harnden in Washington
Last Updated: 2:36am GMT 22/11/2007

A former White House spokesman has claimed that President George W Bush was "involved" in misleading the public about who in the administration leaked the name of a CIA agent.

The allegation by Scott McClellan, the White House press secretary from 2003 to last year and a long-time Bush loyalist from Texas, underlined the increasing isolation of the president as senior aides resign and allies turn on him.

It came in a three-paragraph excerpt from a book by Mr McClellan which promises to implicate Mr Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney in the scandal surrounding the disclosure of the identity of Valerie Plame, a covert CIA officer, in 2003.

"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," Mr McClellan writes in What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and What's Wrong with Washington, to be published in April.

"So I stood at the White House briefing room podium 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. There was one problem. 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."

Lewis "Scooter" Libby, chief of staff to Mr Cheney, was convicted of perjury for lying to investigators but had his jail sentence commuted by Mr Bush. Mr Rove, the president's chief strategist, and Andrew Card, Mr Bush's chief of staff, have since left the administration.

The exhaustive investigation found that no one had leaked Miss Plame's name illegally, though journalists had been briefed about her identity by Mr Libby and Mr Rove as the Bush administration sought to rebut allegations by her husband, Joseph Wilson, that they had hyped the case for the Iraq war. Mr Wilson, a former ambassador, had been sent to Niger by the CIA in February 2002 after his wife had suggested he could investigate whether Saddam Hussein ever sought uranium yellowcake there.

In July 2003, he went public, blasting the Bush administration and saying he had found no evidence of any Saddam link. It appears that Mr McClellan will stop short of saying that Mr Bush lied. In March, he said on the Larry King Show that he had "said what I believed to be true at the time" when he repeatedly assured the press that Mr Libby and Mr Rove had not been involved in discussing Miss Plame's identity.

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The spin is that the divulged paragraph doesn't mean Bush** lied. All righty then, Scotty's apologized for "unknowingly" misleading the American people...When do we get Bush**'s apology? And when is he going to do something about those who lied to him and Scotty?

Yeah, I'm not holding my breath either, Keith.