DOJ Confirms Cheney's Key Role in CIA Leak Case
The Obama administration again this week moved to protect former Vice President Dick Cheney's 2004 interview with the FBI over the outing of covert CIA operative Valerie Plame. But in so doing, the Justice Department's court filing only served to confirm Cheney's central role in guiding the Bush White House response to - and retaliation against - Plame's husband, Ambassador Joseph Wilson.
As the Washington Post reported, a list of what Cheney discussed with prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald is documented in a declaration to the court by Acting Assistant Attorney General David J. Barron. Unlike the DOJ's earlier "Daily Show" defense, Barron declared much of those conversations "are covered by 'the deliberative process privilege,' protecting advice, recommendations and other 'deliberative communications' between government officials."
Among those supposedly protected conversations cited by Barron were critical elements of the Bush administration's smearing of Joe Wilson and the ending of his wife's career:
He mentioned in particular Cheney's discussion of his conversation with then-CIA Director George J. Tenet about "the decision to send Ambassador Joseph Wilson on a fact-finding mission to Niger in 2002." Wilson is the former CIA operative's husband, and a report he filed after the trip cast doubt on claims that Iraq had purchased uranium from Niger for a nuclear weapons program. President George W. Bush cited those claims as part of the justification for the Iraq war.
Barron also listed as exempt from disclosure Cheney's account of his requests for information from the CIA about the purported purchase; Cheney's discussions with top officials about the controversy over Bush's mention of the uranium allegations in his 2003 State of the Union speech; and Cheney's discussions with deputy I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, press spokesman Ari Fleischer, and Chief of Staff Andrew H. Card Jr. "regarding the appropriate response to media inquiries about the source of the disclosure" of Valerie Plame Wilson's identity.
The declaration also said Cheney had helped resolve disputes about "whether to declassify certain information," including portions of a National Intelligence Estimate related to Iraqi weapons programs that Libby leaked to then-New York Times reporter Judith Miller.
As it turns out, Barron's catalog confirms earlier reporting regarding Dick Cheney's heavy hand in the scandal. Cheney famously scribbled notes on a copy of Wilson's July 6, 2003 piece, asking "did his wife send him on a junket?" As the National Journal revealed in April 2006, it was Cheney who authorized his chief-of-staff Scooter Libby to selectively leak cherry-picked portions of the classified National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq:
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.
As the Journal's Murray Waas reported two months later on July 3, 2006, it was President Bush himself who confirmed to Fitzgerald that he asked Cheney to lead the counterattack on the Wilsons:
President Bush told the special prosecutor in the CIA leak case that he directed Vice President Dick Cheney to personally lead an effort to counter allegations made by former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV that his administration had misrepresented intelligence information to make the case to go to war with Iraq, according to people familiar with the president's interview.
Bush also told federal prosecutors during his June 24, 2004, interview in the Oval Office that he had directed Cheney, as part of that broader effort, to disclose highly classified intelligence information that would not only defend his administration but also discredit Wilson, the sources said.
But Bush told investigators that he was unaware that Cheney had directed I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, the vice president's chief of staff, to covertly leak the classified information to the media instead of releasing it to the public after undergoing the formal governmental declassification processes.
In his closing arguments in the conviction of Libby (whose pardon Cheney advocated even into the final hours of the Bush presidency), special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald pointedly noted, "There is a cloud over the vice president...and that cloud remains because this defendant obstructed justice." Should the Obama administration succeed in blocking access to Cheney's FBI interview, that cloud will continue to hover over the former vice president.
But as the DOJ's filing itself shows, some rays of sunlight are shining through.
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