On Friday, former White House press secretary Scott McClellan testified before the House Judiciary Committee. This is a significant matter because he is the highest ranking member of the Bush administration to come before Congress on the issue of the Valerie Plame CIA leak case. I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby was sentenced to 30 months in prison for leaking to journalist Robert Novak the identity of Valerie Plame as a CIA covert agent. This is a federal offense, yet President Bush later commuted Libby’s sentence. Journalist and political insiders have made the claim since 2004 that Libby leaked the information at the orders of the vice president to attack Plame’s husband Ambassador Joseph Wilson, who was assigned to investigate the mysterious “yellow cake” in Niger the president claimed Saddam Hussein was eager to get his hands on. Reports have stated that former White House deputy chief of staff, Karl Rove was involved with the leak as well

But with Scott McClellan’s book, What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception, revealing other critical points such as the administration’s build up to the Iraq War and what McClellan described as a constant “permanent campaign” mode that the administration was in even after the election was over, House Judiciary Democrats were eager to use this as an opportunity to find out what was really going on in the White House.

House Republicans believe that McClellan has ulterior motives and is a bitter former employee out to make a buck on book sales. Some Democrats on the committee asked McClellan if he believed that Congress should open impeachment hearings against the president and vice president. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-TX) asked, “Should the president be impeached?” McClellan responded, “I do not support impeachment based on what I know.”

From my own perspective, it was amazing sitting just 7 feet away from Scott McClellan as I’ve been temporarily handling judiciary issues with a co-worker for my boss Rep. Hank Johnson (D-GA). It appeared to me that the Dems saw an opportunity in Scott McClellan to extract anything and everything they could to exploit the secretive Bush administration, even if that meant asking him questions about issues that were going on after he departed the White House. Rep. Steve Cohen (D-TN) asked McClellan what knew about the administration’s plans for Iran. Other Democrats asked about the firings of 8 U.S. attorneys. To many of these questions, McClellan claimed that he was not in a position to create policy as a press secretary or he stated that the event in question occurred after he had resigned.

Republicans framed the hearing as a waste of time and as an open “book club session.” Many of the GOP members of the committee didn’t return to the hearing room after the session temporarily halted for floor debate and a vote on the crucial Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). Reminiscent of the Watergate hearings with Nixon White House counsel John Dean before the Senate Select Committee in May 1973, Rep.Steve King (R-IA) asked if McClellan’s very presence harmed the potential relationship for future White House press secretaries and the Oval Office.

As for the $1 trillion dollar question: What were President Bush’s motives for entering Iraq? McClellan responded, “I think his driving motivation was this idealistic and ambitious vision that he could transform the Middle East…that Iraq would be a lynch pin for democracy in Iraq.”

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