Vice President Cheney did lie to prosecutors about his role in the vendetta against former ambassador Joe Wilson and his wife, CIA agent Valerie Plame.
The vice president had been engaged in a series of efforts to "prove" that Saddam Hussein was obtaining uranium for nuclear weapons -- a discovery which, had it been true, would have provided the Bush administration with justification for going to war with Iraq. No such justification existed, as Joe Wilson, in the role of special investigator/envoy, demonstrated. Cheney then set out to destroy the reputations of Wilson and his wife.
CREW (Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington) have obtained documents relating to Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald and the FBI's behind-closed-doors questioning of Cheney. The former vice president has maintained that he knew nothing/could remember nothing about the "outing" of Valerie Plame, a CIA agent -- a crime punishable under federal law. Interviewer's notes show a chain of "can't recalls" when asked about his connection to the betrayal of a CIA employee.
But Cheney was known for his sharp, detailed memory. And he did know about selling out the CIA operative. Trial documents show that he "instructed" his chief of staff, "Scooter" Libby, to "out" Plame to New York Times reporter Judith Miller.
Mr. Cheney, who agreed to be interviewed by prosecutors after long negotiations, said he had played no role in sharing an intelligence report with a reporter to bolster the administration’s claim that Saddam Hussein had tried to obtain uranium for a nuclear weapons program. Mr. Cheney said in the interview that “no one ever told him of a desire to share key judgments” of the classified document.
But Mr. Libby, the vice president’s chief of staff at the time, gave a sharply different account of Mr. Cheney’s behavior in July 2003. Mr. Libby offered a detailed account of Mr. Cheney’s role in authorizing the intelligence report to be shared on July 8 with Judith Miller, then a reporter for The New York Times.
He testified under oath in March 2004 that Mr. Cheney had thought it was “very important” to get out the information in the report that Mr. Hussein had tried to acquire uranium, saying “the vice president instructed me to go talk to Judy Miller to lay this out for her.”
Now what? Want to bet the Department of Justice makes this go away?
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