Shot of McClellan

(Newser) - Scott McClellan agreed today to testify about Dick Cheney's role in leaking the name of a CIA agent, the AP reports. In a hearing next week, House lawmakers are expected to ask him about his claim that Cheney and President Bush told him to "exonerate Scooter Libby" as White House spokesman. McClellan made the recent claim while hyping his new Washington tell-all memoir, What Happened. More »

(Newser) - Scott McClellan's treatment of the Valerie Plame leak case has a key player wondering who really guided the former press secretary’s pen. "His robotic performances from the White House podium seemed only to disgorge what he had been told, and What Happened has the similar feel of someone else's hand," Robert Novak, to whom Plame's CIA role was leaked, writes in the Chicago Sun-Times . More »

(Newser) - Scott McClellan isn't someone Peggy Noonan found herself admiring, she writes in the Wall Street Journal , but she did end up “believing him" after finishing his memoir. He didn’t pen his story to make friends or salvage his image, but rather to set the record straight as he saw it. And first-person accounts are exactly what’s needed: “Feed history,” Noonan demands. More »

(Newser) - The Bush administration's reaction to Scott McClellan's new book should look familiar to anyone with HBO, with one important difference, writes Mike Lupica in the Daily News. "it has become clear by now that even the hoods from The Sopranos would be out of their weight class with George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Karl Rove." More »

(Newser) - In Scott McClellan, the White House built a Frankenstein monster to regurgitate its “talking points, monotonously if not mindlessly, no matter what argument or fact stood in the way,” Dana Milbank writes in the Washington Post . Well now the monster is back, with “famous fealty to his message…as stubborn as ever”—but now he’s programmed for Bush-bashing, not Bush-boosting. More »

(Newser) - Bush turncoat Scott McClellan may have taken his hardest hit yesterday in a personal message from Bob Dole, who called the ex-press secretary a “miserable creature.” “Your type soaks up the benefits of power, revels in the limelight for years, then quits, and spurred on by greed, cashes in with a scathing critique,” the 1996 Republican presidential nominee wrote in an email leaked to Politico. More »

(Newser) - CNN reporter Jessica Yellin charged on-air last night that “the press corps was under enormous pressure from corporate executives” to present the Iraq war consistently “with the patriotic fever in the nation and the president's high approval ratings.” Responding to Scott McClellan’s complaint that reporters were too “deferential,” Yellin—who was at ABC in the war run-up—told Anderson Cooper her own pieces were edited to elevate the positive and downplay the critical. More »

(Newser) - Affection and loyalty blinded Scott McClellan in the run-up to the Iraq war, but now the former press secretary has found a higher allegiance—“a loyalty to the truth.” McClellan, whose book is causing a media storm for alleging President Bush ran a “propaganda” campaign about the war, defended his work this morning on NBC's Today . More »

(Newser) - Katie Couric thinks Scott McClellan has a point with his criticism of the media in the lead-up to the war, but Charlie Gibson and Brian Williams beg to differ—and that's a disgrace, writes Glenn Greenwald in Salon. During a get-together of network anchors, the "painfully empty-headed Gibson" and the "mindlessly establishment-defending" Williams said the media offered plenty of skepticism, but Greenwald counters that today's celebrity journalists simply don't understand their own profession. More »

(Newser) - Scott McClellan writes in his memoir that “the ‘liberal media’ didn't live up to its reputation” on Iraq. “If it had, the country would have been better served.” Some insider reactions: “You know you're a wussy press corps when the former White House Press Secretary says you were too easy on him,” James Poniewozik writes in Time . He agrees many writers were worried about appearing unpatriotic in the run-up to war, but it’s “pathetic” McClellan was parroting President Bush when he knew better. More »

(Newser) - With the political world abuzz over the harsh tone of Scott McClellan’s new memoir about the "culture of deception''  in the Bush White House, Karl Rove is defending himself against one of the former spokesman’s most damning claims—that Rove and Scooter Libby colluded in a Valerie Plame cover-up and misled McClellan on the matter. Rove says, contrary to the McClellan account, he and Libby spoke regularly—and never discussed the CIA outing. More »

(Newser) - Former White House spokesman Scott McClellan blasts President Bush for not being "open and forthright" about the war in Iraq and using "propaganda" to sell it, Politico reports. The president "veered terribly off course," McClellan writes in his surprisingly harsh new memoir. He also criticizes the press for not challenging Bush enough, even while admitting that some of his own statements at press conferences were "badly misguided." More »