Quote:
The Smoking Pen
By Dan Froomkin
Special to washingtonpost.com
Monday, May 15, 2006; 1:15 PM
Handwritten notes from Vice President Cheney once and for all place the vice president at the epicenter of a scandal that still threatens to tear apart the Bush White House.
The notes were scrawled in the margins of former U.S. ambassador Joseph Wilson's fateful July 2003 New York Times op-ed piece, in which Wilson described his trip to Niger at the behest of the CIA and criticized the White House for misusing intelligence in the run-up to war in Iraq.
"Do we ordinarily send people out pro bono to work for us?" Cheney scribbled atop his copy, a reproduction of which was filed in federal court late Friday by special prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald. "Or did his wife send him on a junket?"
The annotated article is one of the pieces of evidence Fitzgerald intends to introduce in the perjury and obstruction of justice trial of Cheney's then-chief of staff, Scooter Libby.
"Those annotations support the proposition that publication of the Wilson Op-Ed acutely focused the attention of the vice president and the defendant -- his chief of staff -- on Mr. Wilson," Fitzgerald wrote in his filing.
In fact, whether it was Cheney's explicit intention or not, two days later Libby and White House political guru Karl Rove were telling reporters that Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, worked at the CIA.
Fitzgerald is said to still be considering filing charges against Rove, whose testimony in the case, like Libby's, has changed dramatically over time.
The notes also offer an insight into Cheney's state of mind. It's an often overlooked aspect of this case that the objective of alerting reporters to the identity of Wilson's wife was to imply that his trip was some sort of nepotistic plum.
But what kind of person would think that a secret mission to the landlocked, impoverished and generally benighted country of Niger is a junket? Either someone quite delusional -- or someone so caught up in the desire to punish and ruin his enemies that the preposterousness of the accusation doesn't really make a difference.
This is notably not the first time that Cheney himself has been spotted at the nerve center of the Plame case. Rove is said to have initially told the grand jury he first heard about Plame from some reporter -- then he said he heard it from Libby. Libby is said to have initially told the grand jury he first heard about Plame from reporters -- but Libby's own notes showed he first heard about her from Cheney.
Michael Isikoff , apparently the first reporter to spot Fitzgerald's filing, wrote Saturday on Newsweek's Web site: "The role of Vice President Dick Cheney in the criminal case stemming from the outing of White House critic Joseph Wilson's CIA wife is likely to get fresh attention as a result of newly disclosed notes showing that Cheney personally asked whether Wilson had been sent by his wife on a 'junket' to Africa. . . .
"It is extremely rare, if not unprecedented, for Cheney's own notes to be made public. The notes -- apparently obtained as a result of a grand jury subpoena -- would appear to make Cheney an even more central witness than had been previously thought in the criminal probe."
Isikoff writes that Fitzgerald also announced his intention to "introduce evidence about a series of conversations that he argued could undercut one of Libby's principal defenses: that he had no reason to believe Plame's employment was a sensitive matter and therefore had no reason to lie to the grand jury about when and with whom he spoke about it."
R. Jeffrey Smith writes in Sunday's Washington Post: "The filing by special prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald is the second that names Cheney as a key White House official who questioned the legitimacy of Wilson's examination of Iraqi nuclear ambitions. It further suggests that Cheney helped originate the idea in his office that Wilson's credibility was undermined by his link to Plame."
Pete Yost writes for the Associated Press that "the prosecutor is leaving the door open to the possibility that the vice president's now-indicted former chief of staff, I. Lewis Libby, was acting at his boss' behest when Libby allegedly leaked information about Plame to reporters."
Here's the filing . Here are all of Fitzgerald's exhibits . Here's the annotated Wilson article .
Blogger Jane Hamsher , noting that Cheney had known about Plame's role in the Wilson trip for more than a month, writes: "These were marching orders, not a question."
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source:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...041100879.html
the original has links to related source material, so check that.
among them you find the following:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12774143/site/newsweek/
which is a copy of fitzgerald's filing regarding the cheney memo.
i remain agnostic on all this in that i am interested to see how this turns out more than i am interested in narrating variants along the way.
but it does seem clear that reality is moving one way and the national review another.