In his first cable news interview about his new book, What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception, former White House press secretary Scott McClellan sat down with MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann tonight. McClellan talked about his experience as the President’s spokesman during the early months of the Iraq war, and during the Valerie Plame investigation: “I passed along false information,” McClellan says of the Plame leak. Olbermann also took the time to talk about one of his favorite subjects…
Olbermann: What was Fox News to you and to the White House? Was it a friendly cousin, house organ, was it the choice for funneling propaganda? What was it?
AdvertisementMcClellan: Well — there certainly are allies there that work at Fox News and there’s one story that I’ve told before, I didn’t include it in the book, but during the vice president’s hunting accident, which was another disillusioning moment for me because I was out there advocating get this news out and get it out now and of course the vice president said, no no, no, and then decided to send it to the Web site where the Corpus Christi Collar Times Web site, as opposed to getting it out widely to the national media.
Olbermann: I remember.
McClellan: And caused me a lot of fun at the podium for three days before the vice president decided that he was going to go out and talk about this after a little nudging from the president. And we were standing outside the Oval getting ready for a meeting and he looked at me, and he said, you already know why I picked Fox News to do this, because I want everybody else to have to cite Fox News when they do their report. It’s just kind of the attitude of the vice president about things.