David Corn (The Nation): Cheney on Trial

[Jack Rabbit]

From The Nation
Issue of March 26, 2007
Posted online Thursday March 8

Cheney on Trial
By David Corn

It was fall 2003. The news had broken that the Justice Department, at the request of the CIA, was investigating the leak that outed Valerie Wilson as an undercover intelligence officer, and FBI investigators were targeting White House officials. With a firestorm under way, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, went to see his boss. Libby hadn't passed any information about Valerie Wilson to right-wing columnist Robert Novak, who first published the leak in a July 14, 2003, column. But he had talked to other reporters about Valerie Wilson and her CIA connection before the leak occurred. And he also knew that Karl Rove, White House über-strategist, had spoken to Novak about her days before the leak column. That is, Libby knew a fair bit about the episode.

Libby told Cheney he had not been one of Novak's two Administration sources for the leak, and he offered to disclose to the Vice President everything he knew. But Cheney did not want to hear it; Libby said no more.

Shortly after that, Libby, responding to a request from investigators, came across a note in his files indicating that in early June 2003--weeks before the Wilson affair began--Cheney had told him that the wife of former Ambassador Joseph Wilson worked at the CIA's Counterproliferation Division, a unit of the agency's clandestine operations directorate. (At that point, the former envoy had spoken only privately to two reporters about his CIA-sponsored trip to Niger, during which he had concluded there was not much to the intelligence report that Iraq had been uranium-shopping there.) The note was a significant discovery. A key issue in the investigation was who in the Bush Administration had spread information about Wilson's wife to undermine Wilson's charge that the White House had twisted the prewar intelligence (a criticism Wilson made public in a July 6, 2003, New York Times op-ed). And Libby had uncovered evidence showing that Cheney had conducted his own research on Joseph Wilson early on, learned about Valerie Wilson's CIA job and shared the information with Libby. Cheney apparently was the first White House official to discuss Valerie Wilson's specific place of work.

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[peacetalksforall]

1. Well done. Very clear. Must read if you're fuzzy about things.

from the angle of Fitzgerald (for now).

This cloud over the WH and all the others ranging from mold to a bloodbath of U.S. Attornies is so thick that they will need to keep the lights on all day long.

Where is Cheney, by the way - bunkered down?

How many Republicans are getting together to discuss what to do about Cheney?
How many of them are Cheney supporters no matter what?

Who will rule among the bigwig Republicans?

[HysteryDiagnosis]

2. My dog bit someone..... I was charged with not controlling my

dog in public, so it went with the dick and libby libby libby.