In his forthcoming book, the former White House press secretary Scott McClellan says President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney lied to the public about the role of White House aides in leaking the identity of a CIA operative, and were involved in the cover-up. McClellan recounts a 2003 news conference in which he told reporters that strategist Karl Rove and I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby were "not involved" in the leak involving operative Valerie Plame.
"There was one problem. It was not true," McClellan writes, in an excerpt of the book released yesterday. "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 (Andrew Card) and the president himself."
For perhaps the first time since he shot his friend, Austin attorney Harry Whittington, Vice President Dick Cheney acknowledged on Tuesday that he has made a mistake. He said that he was wrong in 2005 when he insisted the insurgency in Iraq was in its "last throes."
It was Cheney's first real public admission of what everyone else seems to already know: The Administration badly bungled in their estimation of the strength of America's enemies in the unpopular war in Iraq. The architect of the war, and Shadow President made the admission in an interview on CNN's "Larry King Live."
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