Hydrablog

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/31/us/politics/31cheney.html
October 31, 2009
In ’04 Interview, Cheney Denied C.I.A. Leak Role
By DAVID JOHNSTON [former bush white house] [the 2003 imbroglio that became the Plame case] [veep’s office and staff] [Veep Cheney and his then chief of staff and NSC advisor, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby] [was convicted of lying to FBI and sentenced to jail] [Bush commuted sentence] [Cheney broke with Bush’s refusal to pardon Libby as new admin coming into office] [rather public flap for that administration] [lots of important history] [but here the issue is whether veep Cheney lied—the answer seems clearly yes but did so in way that cannot be prosecuted without principal confessing] [notes on depostions and interviews] [he forgot a lot of stuff?] [*]
WASHINGTON — Former Vice President Dick Cheney denied in an interview with a special prosecutor investigating the C.I.A. leak case that he had played any role in the disclosure of the identity of Valerie Wilson as an intelligence officer, according to F.B.I. documents released Friday. [Fitzgerald probably said it best: there’s a cloud over the vice presidency] [*]
Some of the assertions by Mr. Cheney in his interview with the prosecutor on May 8, 2004, appeared to conflict with testimony at the 2007 trial of his chief of staff, I. Lewis Libby Jr., who was convicted of perjury and obstruction of justice and whose sentence was later commuted by President George W. Bush. [*]
The interview documents were made public through a lawsuit brought by the organization Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, [CREW as it’s called] [Melanie Sloan?] [*] and included a 28-page typewritten summary of the interview with the prosecutor, Patrick J. Fitzgerald, and copies of handwritten notes taken by agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. In a statement, the organization said Mr. Cheney had displayed “an astonishing inability to recollect even simple facts.”
Mr. Cheney said in the interview that he could not recall how or when he had learned of Ms. Wilson’s identity and that he could not recall discussing it with Mr. Libby. Mr. Cheney denied knowing who, if anyone, at the White House had talked to the columnist Robert Novak about Ms. Wilson’s identity. [*]He said he did not know of any reporters who might have been given this information before it was disclosed in Mr. Novak’s column on July 14, 2003.
Ms. Wilson is married to a former ambassador, Joseph C. Wilson IV, who wrote an Op-Ed article for The New York Times in which he contested the administration’s assertion that Iraq had tried to obtain uranium, based on a fact-finding trip he made to Niger to investigate a possible uranium purchase.
The Wilson leak was an embarrassing distraction for President Bush and Mr. Cheney, whose role in the episode has remained a mystery that critics hoped would be clarified with the release of F.B.I. interview materials. [hardly a mystery] [but nothing on the record that could put Cheney in jail] [for that, Libby or Rove would have to confess—bloodly unlikely] [*]
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, [but that was Libby was under threat of jail] [now he’s been comutted so no reason for him ro confess any additional details] [*] 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.” [and Cheney says he cannot remember discussion with Libby] [so that’s that] [*]
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