David Corn: The Perfect Stonewall

June 21, 2006

After a brief hiatus to work on a book about the selling of the Iraq war and the CIA leak case, David Corn is back writing his twice-monthly column, "The Loyal Opposition" for TomPaine.com. Corn is also the Washington editor of The Nation and is the author of The Lies of George W. Bush: Mastering the Politics of Deception (Crown Publishers). Read his blog at http://www.davidcorn.com.

Future presidents and press secretaries will owe much to George W. Bush and Scott McClellan—that is, if they ever want to mount a cover up. A week after Karl Rove's lawyer announced he was no longer under investigation by special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald in the CIA leak case, it's rather clear that Rove and the White House pulled perfected the art of stonewalling. They—and this caper—will be an inspiration to spinners everywhere.

In July 2003, when columnist Bob Novak (first) and Time magazine (second) published stories disclosing that Valerie Wilson was a CIA officer—and cited administration officials as their sources—the White House responded with a simple denial. McClellan, who had just inherited the White House press secretary position from Ari Fleischer, said of this leak, "That is not the way this president or this White House operates." There was no wiggle room in that statement.