Innocent! Innocent I tell you... uh....never mind

Remember White House Secretary Scott McClellan assured us that Karl Rove and Scooter Libby had nothing to do with the outing of CIA agent Valerie Plame? Well, now he is coming out with his memoirs ... and like a lot of memoirs about years in this White House, it makes for interesting reading.

From an excerpt posted on McClellan's publisher's Web site and discovered by Editor and Publisher:

"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 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."

Thank God these people restored trust in the White House after the Clinton years. But of course, it could be that McClellan doesn't know what he's talking about, just like Paul O'Neil' in his memoirs, The Price of Loyalty.


UPDATE: Well, after putting out that little tidbit for the world to see, the publisher now says that the obvious implication just ain't so. Read about it here.