Dick Cheney was Scooter Libby's original source on the identity of Valerie Plame!
Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff first learned about the CIA officer at the center of a leak investigation in a conversation with Cheney weeks before her identity became public in July 2003, The New York Times reported on Monday.
Notes of the conversation between chief of staff Lewis Libby and Cheney on June 12, 2003, put a spotlight on the vice president's possible role in the leak. The account also appears to run counter to Libby's testimony to a federal grand jury that he first learned about the CIA officer, Valerie Plame, from reporters.
Patrick Fitzgerald, the federal prosecutor investigating the leak of Plame's identity, is said by lawyers involved in the case to be considering bringing charges against Libby for making false statements and possibly obstruction of justice.
This now puts the Vice-President in the "Chain-of-Evidence" on the leak investigation. We now have a story that starts with Cheney telling his top aid information and ends with that information leaked to a reporter and thus compromising National Security. So the next question is: Did Dick Cheney direct his most trusted staff member to reveal the idenity of a covert CIA agent in an effort to discredit that agent's husband? Well?
1 comment:
Of course, Cheney had something to do with this. Look at it this way, Cheney, by all accounts, is a hard-ass, a force to be reckoned with. Do you think for even a minute that an underling would do something so major without consent? I doubt it. I really, really doubt it. People who do things contrary to the way this administration wants them done find themselves in pretty big trouble, discredited in some way.
The problem is, of course, proving it. How do you prove that Cheney said "Hey, Scooter, go leak this CIA agent's name to the press..." Unless Libby is willing to turn on his boss (which seems highly unlikely since this administration seems to demand total loyalty in its minions) there is no way to prove that Cheney instigated the event. I think the best we can hope for is that this will further weaken the GOP in the eyes of the moderates in this country, who tend to decide who will hold the majorities in the houses and who will sit in the Oval Office.
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