Cheney's Admissions to the CIA Leak Prosecutor and FBI
http://www.truthout.org/122308S
Vice President Dick Cheney, according to a still-highly
confidential FBI report, admitted to federal investigators that he
rewrote talking points for the press in July 2003 that made it much
more likely that the role of then-covert CIA-officer Valerie Plame in
sending her husband on a CIA-sponsored mission to Africa would come
to
light.
Cheney conceded during his interview with federal investigators
that in drawing attention to Plame's role in arranging her husband's
Africa trip reporters might also unmask her role as CIA officer.
Cheney denied to the investigators, however, that he had done
anything on purpose that would lead to the outing of Plame as a
covert
CIA operative. But the investigators came away from their interview
with Cheney believing that he had not given them a plausible
explanation as to how he could focus attention on Plame's role in
arranging her husband's trip without her CIA status also possibly
publicly exposed. At the time, Plame was a covert CIA officer
involved
in preventing Iran from obtaining weapons of mass destruction, and
Cheney's office played a central role in exposing her and nullifying
much of her work.
Cheney revised the talking points on July 8, 2003 - the very same
day that his then-chief of staff, I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby, met with
New York Times reporter Judith Miller and told Miller that Plame was
a
CIA officer and that Plame had also played a central role in sending
her husband on his CIA sponsored trip to the African nation of Niger.
Both Cheney and Libby have acknowledged that Cheney directed him
to meet with Miller, but claimed that the purpose of that meeting was
to leak other sensitive intelligence to discredit allegations made by
Plame's husband, former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, that the Bush
administration misrepresented intelligence information to go to war
with Iraq, rather than to leak Plame's identity.
That Cheney, by his own admission, had revised the talking points
in an effort to have the reporters examine who sent Wilson on the
very
same day that his chief of staff was disclosing to Miller Plame's
identity as a CIA officer may be the most compelling evidence to date
that Cheney himself might have directed Libby to disclose Plame's
identity to Miller and other reporters.
This new information adds to a growing body of evidence that
Cheney may have directed Libby to disclose Plame's identity to
reporters and that Libby acted to protect Cheney by lying to federal
investigators and a federal grand jury about the matter.
Still, for those in search of the proverbial "smoking gun", the
question as to whether Cheney directed Libby to leak Plame's identity
to the media at Cheney's direction or Libby did so on his own by
acting over zealously in carrying out a broader mandate from Cheney
to
discredit Wilson and his allegations about manipulation of
intelligence information, will almost certainly remain an unresolved
one.
Libby was convicted on March 6, 2007 of four felony counts of
lying to federal investigators, perjury, and obstruction of justice,
in attempting to conceal from authorities his own role, and that of
other Bush administration officials, in leaking information to the
media about Plame.
One of the jurors in the case, Dennis Collins, told the press
shortly after the verdict that he and many other jurors believed that
Libby was serving as a "fall guy" for Cheney, and had lied to conceal
the role of his boss in directing information about Plame to be
leaked
to the press.
The special prosecutor in the CIA leak case, Patrick Fitzgerald,
said in both opening and closing arguments that because Libby did not
testify truthfully during the course of his investigation, federal
authorities were stymied from determining what role Vice President
Cheney possibly played in directing the leaking of information
regarding Plame that led to the end of her career as a covert CIA
officer, and jeopardized other sensitive intelligence information.
Speaking of the consequences of Libby's deceit to the FBI and a
federal grand jury, Fitzgerald, who is also the U.S. attorney for
Chicago, said in his Feb. 20, 2007 closing argument: "There is talk
about a cloud over the Vice President. There is a cloud over the
White
House as to what happened. Do you think the FBI, the Grand Jury, the
American people are entitled to a straight answer?"
The implication from that and other comments made by Fitzgerald
while trying the case was that Libby had lied and placed himself in
criminal jeopardy to protect Cheney and to perhaps conceal the fact
that Cheney had directed him to leak information to the media about
Plame.
Although it has been widely reported in the media that Cheney and
Libby have denied that Cheney directed Libby ever to speak to
reporters about Plame, those reports have been erroneous. As
Washington Post.com columnist Dan Froomkin wrote in this largely
overlooked column, Libby instead had told both the FBI and a federal
grand jury that he was uncertain as to whether or not Cheney had
directed him to talk to reporters about Plame.
An FBI agent testified at Libby's trial, as Froomkin pointed out,
that Libby had told the FBI that during a July 12, 2003 conversation
that Libby had with Cheney, the two men possibly discussed "whether
to
report to the press that Wilson's wife worked for the CIA."
That conversation occurred exactly four days after Cheney ordered
the revision of the talking points and Libby had his conversation
with
Judith Miller about Plame.
And immediately after that July 12, 2003 conversation between
Cheney and Libby, Libby spoke by phone with Matthew Cooper, then a
correspondent for Time magazine, and confirmed for Cooper that Plame
worked for the CIA and that she had played a role in sending her
husband to Niger.
A contemporaneous FBI report recounting the agents' interview
with
Libby also asserts that Libby had refused to categorically deny to
them that Cheney had directed him to leak information to the press
about Plame. A heavily redacted copy of Libby's interviews with FBI
agents was turned over this summer to the House Committee on
Oversight
and Government Reform.
The committee's chairman, Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Ca.) wrote
Attorney
General Michael Mukasey on June 3, 2008, reiterating an earlier
request that Mukasey turn over to the committee the FBI report of its
interview of Vice President Cheney in regards to the Plame matter:
"In his interview with the FBI, Mr. Libby states that it was
'possible' that Vice President Cheney instructed [Libby] to
disseminate information about Ambassador Wilson's wife to the press.
This is a significant revelation and, if true, a serious matter. It
cannot be responsibly investigated without access to the Vice
President's interview."
Mukasey declined to release the Cheney report to Waxman in
particular, and Congress in general.
But a person with access to notes of Cheney's interview with
federal investigators described to me what Cheney said during those
interviews. Later the same person read to me verbatim portions of the
interview notes directly relevant to this story.
:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
At the time of the leak of Plame's identity, Cheney, Libby and
other Bush administration officials were attempting to discredit
Wilson because of the charges that he was making that the White House
had manipulated intelligence information to take the nation to war
with Iraq. Wilson, a retired career diplomat and former ambassador,
had traveled to Niger in February 2002 on a CIA- sponsored mission to
investigate allegations that Saddam Hussein's regime had attempted to
procure uranium from the African nation. Wilson reported back to the
CIA that the allegations were most certainly untrue.
Despite numerous warnings from the CIA and elsewhere in
government
that the Niger allegations were most likely false or even contrived,
President Bush cited them in his 2002 State of the Union address as a
rationale to go to war with Iraq.
On July 6, 2003, Wilson published an op-ed in The New York Times
charging that the Bush administration had "twisted" intelligence when
it cited the alleged Niger-Iraq connection in the president's State
of
Union earlier that year. At the time, U.N. weapons inspectors in Iraq
could not find out weapons of mass destruction. Wilson's allegations
were among the first from an authoritative source that the
administration might have misled the nation to go to war.
A central part of the effort to counter Wilson's allegations
entailed discrediting him by suggesting that his selection for the
trip had been a case of nepotism. Cheney, Libby, then-White House
political adviser Karl Rove, and other White House officials told
reporters that Wilson's wife, who worked at the CIA, had been
primarily responsible for selecting him to go to Niger.
The day after Wilson's op-ed, on July 7, 2003, Cheney personally
dictated talking points for then-presidential secretary Ari Fleischer
and other White House officials to use to counter Wilson's charges
and
discredit him.
A central purpose for writing the talking points was to
demonstrate that the Vice President's office had played little if any
role in Wilson being sent to Niger and that Cheney was not told of
Wilson's mission prior to the war with Iraq.
In talking points Cheney dictated on July 7, Cheney wrote as his
first one: "The Vice President's office did not request the mission
to
Niger." The three other talking points asserted that the "Vice
President's office was not informed of Joe Wilson's mission"; that
Cheney's office was not briefed about the trip until long after it
occurred, and that Cheney and his aides only learned about the trip
when they received press inquiries about it a full year later.
:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
About a month prior to Wilson having written his own op-ed for
the
Times, he had told his story of his mission to Niger to New York
Times
columnist Nicholas Kristof, who wrote a detailed account of Wilson's
trip and his allegations.
In reaction to that column, Cheney personally made inquiries
about
the matter to both then-CIA director George Tenet and then-CIA deputy
director John McLaughlin, apparently on either June 11 or June 12,
2003, according to evidence made public at Libby's federal criminal
trial. Both Tenet and McLaughlin told Cheney of Plame's role (in
reality, a tenuous one) to the selection of her husband for the Niger
mission.
On June 12, Cheney and Libby spoke, and Cheney told Libby about
Plame's supposed role.
In notes that Libby took of the conversation, Libby wrote that
Cheney said he been told by the CIA officials that Wilson's mission
to
Niger "took place at our behest"-in reference to the CIA. More
specifically, the notes indicted the mission was undertaken at the
request of the CIA's covert Counterproliferation Division. The notes
said that Cheney told Libby that he had been informed that Wilson's
"wife works in that division."
Cheney then instructed Libby, according to the notes, to ask the
CIA to set the record straight by saying that the Vice President's
office "didn't known about [the] mission" and "didn't get the report
back", in reference to the fact that Cheney's office never received a
copy of a CIA debriefing report of Wilson after he returned from
Niger.
Surprisingly, despite the prominence of Kristof in particular,
and
the Times in general, the column was largely ignored - at least for a
while.
But Wilson's own July 6, 2003 Times op-ed column by rekindled the
issue. Stoking the flames, Wilson appeared on Meet the Press that
same
morning to discuss his column.
Wilson's column, prosecutor Fitzgerald asserted at Libby's trial,
ignited a "firestorm."
Wilson's charges, Fitzgerald went on to say, "came in the fourth
month of the war in Iraq, the fourth month when weapons of mass
destruction were not found. Coming as they did, they ignited a media
firestorm ... the White House was stunned."
In a handwritten notation at the bottom of the July 6 op-ed,
Cheney wrote out several rhetorical questions regarding Wilson and
Plame: "Have they [the CIA] done this before? Send an Amb. to answer
a
question? Do we ordinarily send people out pro-bono to work for us?
Or
did his wife send him on a junket?"
The next day, July 7, Cheney crafted talking points to be
distributed to the media which emphasized that his office had not
requested that Wilson go to Niger, that the CIA had not told him
about
Wilson's findings, and that he personally only learned of the matter
long after the U.S. invaded Iraq - from press reports.
The four talking points dictated by Cheney to his press aide,
Catharine Martin, stated:
• The Vice President's office did not request the mission to Niger.
• The Vice President's office was not informed of Joe Wilson's
mission.
• The Vice President's office did not receive a briefing about Mr.
Wilson's mission after he returned.
• The Vice President's office was not aware of Mr. Wilson's mission
until recent press reports accounted for it.
Martin, in turn, sent those talking points on to, among others,
Ari Fleischer, the-then White House press secretary, who utilized
them
in his briefing or "gaggle" for the press that morning.
Fleischer told reporters that same day, according to a transcript
of the briefing: "The Vice President's office did not request the
mission to Niger. The Vice president's office was not informed of his
mission and he was not aware of Mr. Wilson's mission until recent
press accounts ... accounted for it. So this was something that the
CIA undertook ... They sent him on their own volition."
Also hat same day, Fleischer, who was planning to leave his
position as White House press secretary, had lunch with Libby, during
which, according to Fleischer's testimony at Libby's trial, Libby
spoke extensively about the role of Plame in sending her husband on
the Niger mission.
At the lunch, Fleischer would testify, Libby told him:
"Ambassador
Wilson was sent by his wife. His wife works for the CIA." Fleischer
testified that Libby even referred to Wilson's wife by her maiden
name, Valerie Plame.
"He added it was 'hush-hush', 'and on the QT,' and that most
people didn't know it," Fleischer testified.
The very next morning, on July 8, Libby met with reporter Judith
Miller of the New York Times for two hours for breakfast at the St.
Regis Hotel in downtown Washington in an effort to staunch the damage
done by Wilson's column.
Miller testified at Libby's trial during the breakfast Libby told
her that Wilson's wife worked at the CIA and that Plame had played a
role in selecting him for his Niger mission.
In testimony before the federal grand jury in the CIA leak case,
Libby testified that Cheney had instructed him before the breakfast
to
"get everything out." Regarding the allegations that he leaked
information to Miller about Plame, Libby told federal investigators
that he had never done so.
During the same breakfast, Cheney also disclosed to Miller
portions of a then-still classified National Intelligence Estimate
which Cheney believed demonstrated that the CIA was to blame for
robustly endorsing the Niger information as accurate.
President Bush had personally and secretly declassified portions
of the NIE for the specific purpose of leaking them to Miller. In
disclosing selective portions of the NIE to Miller, only the
President, the Vice President, and Libby knew about the secret
declassification.
"So far as you know, the only three people who knew about this
would be the President, the Vice President, and yourself," Libby was
asked by Fitzgerald during one session by Libby before the federal
grand jury hearing evidence in the CIA leak case,
"Correct, sir," Libby answered.
Also that same day, July 8, 2003, Cheney met again Cathy Martin -
this time on Cheney's office on Capitol Hill. During the meeting,
according to an account Martin gave federal investigators, Cheney
told
Martin that he wanted some changes and additions made to the talking
points devised the previous day that had already been disseminated to
Fleischer and other White House communications aides.
Martin told investigators that Cheney dictated the changes to
her,
and in each case, she took down word for word what the Vice President
said. (Martin later repeated this same account under oath during
Libby's trial.)
Cheney told Martin that he wanted the very first of the talking
points to now read: "It is not clear who authorized Joe Wilson's trip
to Niger."
Cheney, of course, knew that the CIA had authorized Wilson's trip
and had sent Wilson to Niger. Both Cheney and Libby had been told by
a
large number of CIA and State Department officials by then that such
was the case, according to the sworn testimony of those officials at
Libby's trial. And the day before, Fleischer had told the press that
Wilson's mission to Niger was "something that the CIA undertook" and
that they had also "sent him on their own volition."
Why would Cheney change the talking points from the day before if
he knew that the CIA had sent Wilson and he and his staff had
encouraged Fleischer to say that the day before? Obviously, saying it
was unclear who had authorized Wilson's trip to Niger was not only
untrue, it also pointed reporters in the direction of asking about
Plame?
Asked about this during his FBI interview, Cheney was at a loss
to
explain how the change of the talking points focusing attention on
who
specifically sent Wilson to Niger would not lead reporters might lead
to exposure of Plame's role as a CIA officer.
There was a matter, as well, as to why Cheney changed the talking
points to say it was unclear who sent Wilson when in fact he had
admitted earlier during the same interview with investigators that he
clearly knew it was the CIA.
Finally, of course, there was the fact that on the very same day
that Cheney changed the talking points that Libby was meeting with
Miller and telling Miller that Plame worked for the CIA and had sent
her husband to Niger.
In his closing argument during the Libby trial, however,
Fitzgerald did mention the issue briefly. None of the media covering
the trial, however (with the sole exception once again being Dan
Froomkin), appeared to understand its significance or broader
context,
and did not report it.
Noting the change of Cheney's July 7 and July 8, 2003 talking
points, Patrick Fitzgerald said: "The question of who authorized
became number one. That's a question that would lead to the answer:
Valerie Wilson."
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