Cheney In The Spotlight

Coming on the heels of last week's revelations about the President's involvement in the campaign to discredit Joseph Wilson, new Libby testimony revelations confirm previous reports of Vice President Cheney's key role in this saga.

Murray Waas (who is to this story what Bob Woodward was to Watergate) has the goods...

National Journal: Cheney Authorized Leak Of CIA Report, Libby Says

Vice President Dick Cheney directed his then-chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, on July 12, 2003 to leak to the media portions of a then-highly classified CIA report that Cheney hoped would undermine the credibility of former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson, a critic of the Bush administration's Iraq policy, according to Libby's grand jury testimony in the CIA leak case and sources who have read the classified report...

...The previously unreported grand jury testimony is significant because only hours after Cheney reportedly instructed Libby to disclose information from the CIA report, Libby divulged to then-New York Times reporter Judith Miller and Time magazine correspondent Matthew Cooper that Plame was a CIA officer, and that she been involved in selecting her husband for the Niger mission...

(bold added for emphasis in light of last week's controversy)

And let's not forget- for the 'Wilson Lied' crowd on the right- that Colin Powell has now come out to verify Wilson's findings. He stated this week that "I didn’t need Wilson to tell me that there wasn’t a Niger connection. He didn’t tell us anything we didn’t already know." Yes but we did, Colin, because you and your bosses stayed silent.

And, as I've asked in my previous posts, why spread secret, anonymous, and selective leaks if you believe you are right, rather than go public with all the facts? Answer- you wouldn't. The President's defenders (yes, he still has some) insist he just wanted to get the 'truth' out, but their actions betray them there.

Back to the main crux of this story, while Libby's discussion about Plame with reporters occurred on the same day that Cheney authorized those other leaks, Libby insists the two events are unrelated. Well that settles that then. [*cough*]

And while the testimony doesn't insinuate Cheney ordered the Plame leak, Waas notes-

Regarding the release of Plame's name and CIA employment, a senior administration official said that even if Cheney did not directly authorize Libby to leak the information to the press, the vice president might have set a climate in which his aides viewed it as routine to release classified information whenever it served their purposes.

A key point. And as Waas also notes-

It has long been known that Cheney was among the first people in the government to tell Libby that Plame worked for the CIA. The federal indictment of Libby -- who has been charged with five counts of obstruction of justice, perjury, and making false statements to federal investigators in the CIA leak case -- states: "On or about June 12, 2003, Libby was advised by the Vice President of the United States that Wilson's wife worked at the Central Intelligence Agency in the Counterproliferation Division. Libby understood that the Vice President had learned this information from the CIA."

So the $64,000 question is- Did Cheney tell Libby to push the Plame angle or was Libby's decision to do so completely independent and spontaneous? The fact that he mentioned it to multiple reporters, and also that the Plame angle was pushed to even more reporters by other staffers like Karl Rove and the mysterious third man (Stephen Hadley, Dan Bartlett, Orson Welles?) who Robert Novak spoke to, indicates to me that's a major stretch. This was clearly a coordinated effort, not the misguided decision(s) of some White House staffer.

I'm no expert on this story, but it's not hard to connect the dots here. When the leak first occurred in 2003, the White House tried to paint it as random crime- the origins of which they did not know and the involved party/parties responsible they could not figure out. It is becoming increasingly clear that couldn't be farther from the truth.

The President and Vice President knew who was involved and now their lies are catching up to them.

As they say in Washington, it's never the crime... it's always the cover-up.

For more in-depth analysis, check out Firedoglake- here and here.

[PS- Where are the Democrats? Will they stand up and denounce this?]