Scott McClellan

Have you read the latest soul-searching, first-person apostasy by a once aggressive attack dog-turned-critic of the regime?  read more »

Unclear whether this went up today or if it's been there for a while, but Public Affairs Books has posted on their Web site an excerpt from the forthcoming memoir by former White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan, What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and What's Wrong with Washington.

The excerpt is brief but compelling:

The most powerful leader in the world had called upon me to speak on his behalf and help restore credibility he lost amid the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. So I stood at the White house [sic] briefing room podium in front of the glare of the klieg lights for the better part of two weeks and publicly exonerated two of the senior-most aides in the White House: Karl Rove and Scooter Libby.

There was one problem. It was not true.

I had unknowingly passed along false information. And five of the highest ranking officials in the administration were involved in my doing so: Rove, Libby, the vice President, the President's chief of staff, and the president himself.

Not exactly revelatory, but this snippet does suggest that Mr. McLellan's book, currently scheduled for publication April 21, could be a very frank one.

(Via Publisher's Lunch)  read more »

Tony Snow, the Fox News talking head and presumptive White House press secretary, already has a nick  read more »

Tony Snow, the Fox News talking head and presumptive White House press secretary, already has a nick  read more »

This morning's White House press gaggle was filled with scuffling between press secretary Scott McClellan and reporters about the official delays in disclosing Vice President Dick Cheney's shooting of a fellow hunter this weekend. The rancor reportedly peaked with a flare-up between McClellan and NBC's David Gregory, with McClellan telling Gregory to hush because "the cameras aren't on right now." Gregory replied that McClellan was being a "jerk" and that he resented the press secretary "tak[ing] shots at me personally" from the podium.

"I'll calm down when I feel like calming down," Gregory said.

The press office seems to still be trying to quash Gregory after the fact: The entire exchange, though widely reported, is missing from the official transcript.

*CLARIFICATION: Romenesko notes that the transcript is from the still-contentious press conference, later in the day. The morning gaggle has still not been posted on the White House site.