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Filings in CIA Leak Case Paint Cheney as Determined to Counter Critic
Vice President Cheney may be called to testify in the trial of his former staff chief.
(Linda Davidson - The Washington Post)
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"Fitzgerald has to rebut Libby's claim that this was not a big deal," said Randall D. Eliason, a former chief of the section on public corruption and government fraud at the U.S. attorney's office in Washington. "The best way for Fitzgerald to counter this is to show that the vice president himself was involved in responding to the Wilson article and directing Libby to respond. It highlights how implausible it is for Libby to say he just forgot about this incident when he testified."
Fitzgerald's filings also disclosed that part of the anti-Wilson campaign involved leaking previously classified information from an intelligence report about Iraq's alleged nuclear ambitions.
The spectacle of Cheney testifying in the leak case would be a major distraction for the White House, at the very least. The potential witness list is a who's who of the Bush White House, including Karl Rove and former spokesman Ari Fleischer, along with CIA officials and lesser-known State Department aides.
But Cheney would certainly attract the most attention. One of the most powerful vice presidents in history, Cheney has become, over the years, a symbol of the White House's argument on weapons of mass destruction.
A recent Fitzgerald filing shows that Cheney does not let go of things lightly, and the column by Wilson -- who was sent to Niger by the CIA to determine whether Iraq was seeking nuclear weapons materials there -- was no exception. Cheney clipped it from the newspaper, placed it on his desk, wrote some sharply critical notes on it, and discussed it over and over with Libby for days.
Cheney was upset, according to Libby's account in newly disclosed grand jury testimony, by language in the column that Cheney saw as a direct attack on his personal credibility.
It was not an imagined slight: Wilson contrasted what Cheney had said about Iraqi nuclear weapons ambitions earlier that year with what Wilson had said in a 2002 classified report that he suggested had reached Cheney's office. Wilson also bluntly accused the administration of twisting intelligence to exaggerate the Iraqi threat.
Eight days later, columnist Robert D. Novak wrote that two senior administration officials told him that Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, a CIA officer, had put him up to an investigation of Iraq's nuclear-related activities.
