Mark Hurd is exiting HP as he entered the company five years ago: complaining bitterly about leaks to the press. He had every right to be angry in 2005, when Business Week jumped the gun on the news of his surprise hiring as HP’s CEO. Now, not so much.

Hurd is said to be “dismayed by how HP handled its public relations and news leaks” in the wake of his firing, according to a Reuter‘s story that is the latest salvo in the war of spin pitting HP’s disgraced former CEO against the board that ousted him.

It’s been widely reported that Hurd abruptly settled the sexual harassment claim brought against him by Jodie Fisher on his own, short-circuiting the board’s investigation into the matter.  Hurd begs to differ, according to Reuter’s anonymous pro-Hurd source: “In particular, he was angry at apparent leaks from HP’s board last Sunday that claimed his decision to settle the claim with Fisher had interfered with the board’s probe. He called those reports complete ‘lies,’ the source said.”

Who to believe? It’s impossible to say with any certainty, since no smoking-gun emails or other documents have yet to surface, and neither Hurd nor any HP director has been willing to step out from behind the blind of anonymity the media has constructed for them and be quoted by name.

I do know this, though. During the Spygate scandal, Hurd  effectively “hijacked HP’s internal investigation,” as Joe Nocera  put it in his recent New York Times column by “hiring an outside law firm and ordering it to report directly to him, instead of the board, which is the normal practice.” Having been outmaneuvered by Hurd once before, the HP board was not about to cede its authority to investigate Fisher’s accusations to the CEO or anyone else. What’s important is that board found ample reason to fire Hurd, whether in fact he settled unilaterally with Fisher or not.

The terms of Hurd’s settlement with Fisher swear her to secrecy. However, Hurd’s attempt to keep the sexual harassment complaint against him under wraps failed when HP’s board decided to disclose it rather than risk that it would leak to the press. Reuter’s source says that the board should have taken this risk because ”Hurd had been prepared to confront the media firestorm if it leaked.”

This last bit is downright laughable. When the Spygate media firestorm engulfed HP in 2006, Hurd completely vanished from public view, leaving Chairman Pattie Dunn to take the heat. When the CEO finally was forced from his bunker to appear at an HP press conference, he was shaky and evasive, refusing to take questions after nervously reading a prepared statement.

If Hurd is outraged by the HP board’s conduct in firing him, he should step into the firestorm that is scorching HP anew and make the case himself, instead of through nameless proxies. As it is, I see no reason to give the ex-CEO the benefit of the doubt on any claim advanced anonymously on his behalf.

The role that HP General Counsel Michael Holston played in the belated downfall of CEO Mark Hurd is worth highlighting. As detailed in The Big Lie, Hurd probably deserved to be fired as early as 2006, his second year in office, for his part in HP’s errant leak investigations and the ensuing cover-up. That he not only survived the Spygate scandal but managed to consolidate his hold on power by taking the chairmanship away from Pattie Dunn had a lot to do with Holston, who at the time was a partner in the Philadelphia law firm of Morgan Lewis & Bockius.

HP’s demoralized board of directors made a big mistake in failing to hire an outside law firm to do a thorough and truly independent investigation of the Spygate fiasco. Shrewdly, Hurd filled the gap by hiring Holston and his firm. About this, at least, he was forthcoming. “Morgan Lewis reports to me, not to the HP board,” he announced at a press conference. Somehow, reporters failed to recognize the fatal flaw in this arrangement. There was no way that Holston could organize a genuinely independent probe while reporting to someone who should have been a principal target of investigation.

Just a week and half after Hurd had brought in Holston, the lawyer appeared at a hastily organized press conference timed to coincide with Dunn’s forced resignation from the board. Although Holston conceded that Morgan Lewis had not completed its investigation, his selective recitation of the facts of the matter created the erroneous impression that Dunn had taken a much larger role in managing the leak investigations than Hurd had. Holston took no questions from reporters and HP never released Morgan Lewis’s report. It’s not clear, in fact, whether the law firm ever completed its investigation and wrote up its findings. Hurd was pleased with Holston’s work, even so. Not long after the press conference, Hurd fired Ann Baskins, HP’s longtime general counsel, and replaced her with Holston.

When Hurd received Jodie Fisher’s letter accusing him of sexual harassment, he did the right thing in turning it over to Holston. HP’s legal department investigated, assisted by outside counsel, only this time Holston reported to the board, not the CEO. Holston’s harsh assessment of Hurd figured prominently in news reports of his firing for padding his expense account to mask his improper relationship with Fisher. Hurd demonstrated a “profound lack of judgment that seriously undermined his credibility,” Holston said.

Better late than never, I guess.