WASHINGTON — Former White House press secretary Scott McClellan defended his bombshell book about the Bush administration Thursday, saying he didn’t speak up against the overselling of war in Iraq at the time because he gave the president the benefit of the doubt.
“Sometimes, because of your affection for the person you’re working for and your belief in that person, you sometimes lose perspective on some of the larger truths out there,” McClellan said.
In hindsight, McClellan says he came to view the war as a mistake by a president and advisers swept up in a grand plan of seeding democracy in the Middle East by overturning Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s regime.
McClellan said he grew “increasingly dismayed and disillusioned” during his final year as press secretary and pinpointed the unfolding of the CIA leak case of Valerie Plame as his tipping point. He was ordered to say from the press room podium that White House aides Karl Rove and Lewis “Scooter” Libby were not involved in leaking CIA operative Plame’s identity to the press.
Later, a criminal investigation revealed that they were.
