A BUZZFLASH NEWS ALERT
by Meg White

Former White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan testified Friday before the House Judiciary Committee [1] about the contents of his new tell-all book, What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington's Culture of Deception, and his knowledge of the Bush Administration's role in a host of questionable activities.

McClellan appeared before the committee in response to an invitation by Committee Chair Rep. John Conyers (D-MI), rather than a subpoena. While numerous White House officials have been called to testify about a number of different issues, the Bush Administration has consistently used executive privilege as a reason for employees (both former and current) to avoid questioning under oath.

As predicted by committee member Robert Wexler (D-FL) in an interview with BuzzFlash [1] the day before, Republican congressmen attacked McClellan's credibility.

Rep. Ric Keller (R-FL) told McClellan he wouldn't "hit" him for expressing his opinion or making money from doing so, and then did that almost exclusively in his line of questioning. Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-VA) asked McClellan to estimate the number television shows on which he'd appeared in connection with the book.

Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) said he was concerned with the timing of McClellan's book. While he told McClellan, "You could have affected this administration ... before their waning hours," by speaking out earlier, he also seemed troubled by future political events. He hinted that McClellan was affecting the election by having "launched [the book] in the most political time." Several other Republican congressmen also told McClellan he should have said something earlier.

McClellan countered that his job had been to speak for the White House, not express his own misgivings about policy.

Rep. Jerrod Nadler (D-NY) spoke out early on against the aspersions Republicans cast on McClellan's motives:

"Such character assassination is no business of this committee."

Rep. Artur Davis (D-AL) told McClellan that if his fellow Republican Party members tried to disown him, he should "point out to them that there is another [Republican] tradition, other than the cutthroat ideological warfare" practiced by the Bush Administration.

"You find out who your true friends are in a situation like this," McClellan said at the hearing. However, he did not seem personally hurt by attacks from his fellow party members on the committee. In his opening statement, he said that in writing his book he discarded his one-party view:

"I had to remove my partisan lenses and step back from the White House bubble."

Though C-SPAN called the event a "Valerie Plame CIA Identity Leak Investigation," there were many issues of interest to committee members present at the hearing. One timely issue was the firing of U.S. attorneys for supposedly political reasons. On Monday, the D.C. District Court will hear arguments in the executive privilege case regarding former White House counsel Harriet Miers and Chief of Staff Joshua Bolten refusing to testify before the same committee that heard McClellan's testimony Friday.

Rep. Bobby Scott (D-VA) asked about Director of the National Economic Council Larry Lindsey, whom McClellan said lost his job [2] for accurately portraying his estimate of cost of the war in Iraq.

Of the cost, McClellan said, "It was not something that we wanted to discuss at the White House."

Rep. Steve Cohen (D-TN) asked about a great variety topics in his short time questioning McClellan, including the use of Republican National Committee e-mail accounts to evade federal policies, the Swiftboat advertising in the 2004 campaign, build-up to a possible war with Iran, and Bush's absence at funerals of soldiers killed in warfare.

On those issues, however, McClellan had little to offer. His most revealing answers regarded the lead-up to the war in Iraq and the leak of the identity of undercover CIA agent Valerie Plame Wilson, two instances in which the Bush Administration has been accused of misleading Congress and the American people.

McClellan often used corporate lingo to explain the lead-up to the Iraq war. He said that the case for war was "packaged and sold" to Congress and the American people through "marketing." He called it a "war-making campaign" and likened the effort to running for elective office. As for the reasons for entering the war in Iraq, McClellan was surprisingly blunt when asked about the connection between national security concerns and oil:

"If Iraq didn't have its large oil reserves ... it wouldn't have been on the radar."

McClellan also kept returning to the phrase: "less than truthful." Congressmen repeatedly asked him whether or not the president "lied" or told "untruths," and McClellan avoided those two words consistently, while never characterizing the president's statements as the actual truth.

Although he wouldn't say the president lied, McClellan didn't let Bush off completely. He said that by the time he handed over the press secretary position to his successor, he was quite disillusioned. When asked who changed Bush's leadership strategy to the "permanent campaign" that McClellan bemoans in his book and encouraged the president to forgo the bipartisan efforts that marked his term as governor of Texas, McClellan balked. He said, "The president has to bear responsibility for his presidency veering off track."

Rep. Dan Lundgren (R-CA) questioned the necessity of the hearings, noting that since the Democratic leadership has said impeachment is off the table, the hearing is unlikely to lead anywhere.

"I wonder whether what we are doing here is Kucinich lite," Lundgren asked rhetorically, referring to the articles of impeachment introduced by Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) earlier this month.

McClellan did say he'd like to see Vice President Dick Cheney, Cheney's former top aide I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby and former White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove testify, adding that he hoped his testimony would inspire other Bush Administration officials to come forward, though he noted, "sadly, they remain silent."

Regardless, McClellan continued to stick by Bush.

"I do not support impeachment," he said. "I am not here for that purpose."

A BUZZFLASH NEWS ALERT

Read today's original BuzzFlash commentary on McClellan's book here [2].

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