White House doesn't deny Bush-to-Libby leak

In Scott McClellan's recent statements to the press regarding his apostasy, he says that one of the things that pushed him over the edge was the revelation on April 6, 2006, that President Bush had secretly authorized the selective release to reporters of classified information, something that both the president and his then-spokesman McClellan had been vigorously condemning in their public statements about the Valerie Plame leak case.

"I walk onto Air Force One and a reporter had yelled a question to the president trying to ask him a question about this revelation that had come out during the [Libby] legal proceedings," McClellan told the Today Show's Meredith Viera on Thursday morning. "The revelation was that it was the president who had authorized, or enabled, Scooter Libby to go out there and talk about this information. And I told the president that that's what the reporter was asking. He was saying that you, yourself, were the one that authorized the leaking of this information. And he said, 'Yeah, I did.' And I was kinda taken aback."

So "taken aback" evidently that he announced his resignation thirteen days later.

At Friday's morning gaggle in the White House briefing room I asked Press Secretary Dana Perino whether McClellan's claim about what Bush said to him on Air Force One was true. The classified information McClellan was talking about was the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iraq, portions of which were leaked to reporters in the summer of 2003 as part of the Bush administration's counter-attack on Joe Wilson, who had accused the White House of using twisted intelligence to support the invasion of Iraq.

Yesterday, another reporter asked a similar question, but had interpreted Scott's remark as referring to the Plame leak, which is not a claim McClellan explicitly makes. Raw Story