By R. Jeffrey Smith and Jim VandeHei
Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, May 27, 2006

A string of recent court filings in the CIA leak case provide new details of Vice President Cheney's role at the center of an administration effort to rebut an outspoken critic of the White House's rationale for the Iraq war in the summer of 2003. They include his repeated discussions of the issue with his top aide and his part in a counteroffensive that resulted in the unmasking of a CIA officer.

The court filings -- by Special Counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald, who charged Cheney's former chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, with lying in the CIA leak case -- provide a vivid portrait of the vice president's activity. Cheney repeatedly questioned Libby about the war critic, former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV; wrote detailed notes about an op-ed article penned by Wilson; and raised questions about the CIA connections of Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame.

Cheney -- who helped devise the White House argument that Iraq had an extensive program to build weapons of mass destruction before the war -- is described in the filings as upset by Wilson's criticism, which the vice president saw as a direct assault on his credibility.

Fitzgerald does not describe Cheney's actions as illegal or even improper. But the filings make it clear that Cheney had a larger role in the effort to rebut Wilson than was previously known and that his actions could put him in an uncomfortable place: on the witness stand as a sitting vice president.

Legal experts said Cheney would have a difficult time refusing to testify in court as part of a trial to determine whether Libby lied or obstructed justice in the leak probe.

There are, experts said, many precedents for his appearance. In 1876, President Ulysses S. Grant voluntarily gave a deposition on behalf of an aide accused of corruption. President Ronald Reagan gave videotaped testimony in the Iran-contra prosecution of John M. Poindexter and testified himself. Most recently, President Bill Clinton agreed to testify before a grand jury investigating the Monica S. Lewinsky scandal.

One lawyer involved in the Libby case, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because U.S. District Judge Reggie B. Walton has warned lawyers about speaking to the media, said Fitzgerald "is doing everything he can to avoid the sideshow of a constitutional fight over calling a sitting a vice president to testify."

But Carl W. Tobias, a professor of law at the University of Richmond, said Fitzgerald will call Cheney "if he believes it will be probative or helpful to the case." If he does, Tobias said, Cheney is likely to resist, arguing that he should not be forced to testify in a criminal case as a sitting vice president. The trial is expected to begin early next year.

Neither Libby nor Fitzgerald has asserted that Cheney directed Libby to leak Plame's name to the news media, and the details of what Cheney told the prosecutor's office in a June 2004 interview have not been disclosed.

But Fitzgerald went out of his way to say in an April filing that Bush played no role in the leak of Plame's name. He did not similarly exonerate Cheney.

So far, Fitzgerald's latest disclosures are not meant to implicate the vice president so much as they are intended to undermine a key aspect of Libby's defense -- that Libby was so preoccupied by other matters that he forgot, rather than lied about, what he told two journalists, Judith Miller of the New York Times and Matthew Cooper of Time magazine, regarding Plame.

Instead, Fitzgerald said in his filing on Wednesday night that Cheney's focus on an array of issues surrounding Wilson's July 2003 column, including the fact that Plame worked for the CIA, riveted Libby's attention on the same matters "and what should be done to respond to the accusations it contained." This was said to have been the context -- "the state of mind of the Vice President," as Fitzgerald put it -- in which Libby made statements to reporters at the time and later allegedly lied to investigators about what he had said in those statements.

"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.