Cheney Turns to Sgt. Schultz Defense in Plame Case
During the controversy over the Bush administration's prosecutor purge in 2007, former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales raised selective amnesia to an art form. In one single day of Congressional testimony, Gonzales uttered some variant of "I don't recall" 64 times, including the comical, "Senator, that I don't recall remembering." Now with the release of the notes from his 2004 interview with the FBI in the Scooter Libby case, it turns out Dick Cheney's memory is even worse.
Like Gonzales, Vice President Cheney turned to the "Sgt. Schultz Defense." Like the hapless Hogan's Heroes prison guard who routinely protested, "I know nothing - nothing!" Cheney on 72 different occasions in the 28 page FBI summary claimed he could not recall virtually anything about the retaliation against Ambassador Joe Wilson that led to the outing of covert CIA operative wife, Valerie Plame.
As Citizens for Ethics and Responsibility in Washington (CREW) put it, the group whose lawsuit triggered the release of the FBI interview notes, "Cheney 'cannot recall' almost anything about Plame outing." Nick Baumann, writing in Mother Jones, documented "22 Things Dick Cheney Can't Recall About the Plame Case."
Among the instances of Cheney's feigned ignorance large and small is a temporary bout of just-time Alzheimer's when it came to his own notes in response to Wilson's infamous July 6, 2003 about supposed yellow cake in Niger. He had no memory of the questions he scrawled on a copy of Wilson's piece, including the question, "did his wife send him on a junket?"
When asked about Wilson's New York Times editorial of July 6, 2003, Cheney stated that he was "relatively certain he spoke to someone about the article, but he cannot recall exactly who it was." Even when shown a copy of the editorial with notes in his own handwriting in the margin, he indicated "he has no specific recollection of when he wrote the notes" and that "he cannot recall if he discussed the underlined portions of the editorial with any one."
Even more important, as FireDogLake documented in detail, Cheney played dumb about his role in the selective declassification of the 2002 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iraq. Libby and his administration allies had used the NIE piecemeal to counter Wilson's charges in the press, but as Mother Jones pointed, Cheney claimed to the FBI not to remember:
- Having a conversation with Libby during which Libby said he wanted to share the judgments of the National Intelligence Estimate with Judith Miller.
- Whether Libby told him that certain material in the NIE had to be declassified before it could be shared.
Sadly for Vice President Cheney, we know this happened, because Scooter Libby himself said so during his prosecution by Patrick Fitzgerald. As Murray Waas wrote in the National Journal on April 14, 2006 in a piece titled "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.
As the National Journal's 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.
Cheney's total no-recall goes on and on. While Cheney at worst may have lied to federal investigators, at best he left his former chief-of-staff twisting in the wind. As the Washington Post noted:
In many cases, Cheney appeared to leave his chief of staff exposed on damaging admissions that Libby and others had made in the grand jury. Though his memory was hazy on many other things, he said he was certain he had heard no report of Libby's conversations about Plame with Rove, White House spokesman Ari Fleischer or Undersecretary of State Marc Grossman.
Guilt, both his own and that he felt over Libby's subsequent conviction, may be behind his lobbying for Libby's pardon that continued through the final hours of the Bush presidency. Regardless, to ensure the "cloud over the vice president" doesn't dissipate, Dick Cheney will continue to insist he knows nothing.
Just like Sgt. Schultz.
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