McClellan Fingers Rove, Cheney

Even loyal boot polishers can get a little testy when you lie to their face. This is an excerpt from Scott McClellan's book, What Happened. He was White House Press Secretary after Ari Fleischer and before that guy from Fox News. Here he is talking about the press conference in which he denied anyone in the Administration had anything to do with leaking valerie Plame's name to the press:

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.