WASHINGTON — If the nation doesn’t trust the Bush White House, it’s the president’s and Dick Cheney’s own fault, Bush’s former top spokesman told Congress on Friday.
From life-and-death matters on down — the rationale for war, the leaking of classified information, Cheney’s accidental shooting of a friend — the government’s top two leaders undermined their credibility by “packaging” their version of the truth, said former press secretary Scott McClellan.
He described the loss of trust as self-inflicted, telling the House Judiciary Committee that Bush and his administration failed to open up about White House mistakes.
The focus of the panel’s hearing was the leak of CIA operative Valerie Plame’s identity. McClellan said that was a good example of the administration damaging itself by backtracking on a pledge to be upfront.
“This White House promised or assured the American people that at some point when this was behind us they would talk publicly about it. And they have refused to,” McClellan said. “And that’s why I think more than any other reason we are here today and the suspicion still remains.”
The White House dismissed Friday’s hearing as unenlightening and McClellan, who wrote the recent book “What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception,” as uninformed.
“I think Scott has probably told everyone everything he doesn’t know, so I don’t know if anyone should expect him to say anything new today,” said White House spokesman Tony Fratto.
On Friday, McClellan returned repeatedly to his theme that Bush, Cheney and others in the administration had done great damage to themselves by being less than truthful on a range of official matters.
“This is a very secretive White House,” McClellan said. “There’s some things that they would prefer not to be talked about.”
McClellan made clear in the book and in person that he felt especially burned by the Plame matter.
He said that former White House chief of staff Andy Card told him that the president and vice president wanted him to publicly say that Cheney’s top aide, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, was not involved in the leak.
“I was reluctant to do it,” McClellan said Friday. “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 fact, both Libby and former presidential adviser Karl Rove had discussed Plame’s identity with reporters.
State Department official Richard Armitage first revealed Plame’s CIA identity to columnist Robert Novak, who used Rove as a confirming source for a 2003 article.
Around that time, Plame’s husband, former ambassador Joseph Wilson, was criticizing Bush’s march to war in Iraq.
