Scott McClellan isn’t offering much in the way of new revelations about the Plame affair during his testimony on Capitol Hill today but there has been a moment or two of good political theater.
Rep. Steve King (R-IA) asked whether McClellan’s very presence today was poisoning the relationships between all future presidents and their press secretaries.
“What is your advice to your successor secretaries, White House press secretaries, as to how they should handle themselves and how a president might want to handle them – and there’s two parts to this question – what would you say to the succeeding secretaries on whether, at what point they should step up and tell the world in the middle of their job perhaps, and how will the president handle this from this point? Does he have to then put the next press secretary into a cubicle and slide press releases to him under the door for fear that he’ll be coming, either write a book or come before the judiciary committee and divulge information that I believe was at least from a national security- not national security but from the integrity standpoint, could you not have taken some of this to the grave with you and done this country a favor?”
For those who’ve read McClellan’s book, we not hearing much new. He’s talking about the “permanent campaign” and how the Bush Administration was “less than truthful” in selling the Iraq invasion to the public in 2002 and 2003.
About Bush and Iraq: “I think his driving motivation was this idealistic and ambitious vision that he could transform the Middle East…that Iraq would be a lynch pin for democracy in the Middle East.”
Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-TX) was looking for more.
Should the president be impeached?
“I do not support impeachment based on what I know,” McClellan said.
The Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee seemed eager to extract something new from McClellan, asking him for all sorts of the details about the administration’s inner workings.
Steve Cohen (D-TN) asked McClellan what he knew about Iran.
“I think the views of the people in the administration are pretty well know in terms of what we ought to do to confront Iran,” McClellan said.
As for Republican National Committee email accounts, Cohen asked: “Are you aware of any particular policy to use those to avoid government oversight?”
“No,” McClellan said.
Cohen finally asked: Is there anything else that your editor ‘edited out?’
“I don’t think there is anything that would be of interest to this committee that was, as you say, edited out,” McClellan said.
Rep Hank Johnson (D-GA) asked about the commutation of Scooter Libby’s prison sentence.
“There are some who believe that he did that so that he could make sure that Scooter Libby would not at some point spill the beans on the VP or someone else.”
“I don’t know,” McClellan said. “I can understand why people view it that way.”
“It sends a terribly message… and I think that the president should not have made that decision. But that is his right to do it.”
The repeated mention of impeachment seemed to irritate some Republicans.
“You didn’t come here believing someone ought to be impeached did you?”
Dan Lungren (R-CA) asked.
“I am not here for that purpose,” McClellan said.
“I have heard my colleagues here refer to impeachment four times, yet we’ve been told by the leadership on the Democratic side that impeachment is off the table,” Lungren said. “Is what we are doing here Kucinich like?”
