<snip>
With a full-force firestorm under way, Libby, according to his grand jury testimony, went to Cheney and "offered to tell him everything I knew." Libby had not been a source for the Novak column. But at the time of that leak, he had talked to reporters about Wilson's wife and her CIA connection. (What he said is at issue in the trial.) He told the grand jury that he thought he ought to let Cheney know what he had done in the days before the leak. Yet Cheney, Libby recalled, "didn't want to hear." When Libby offered to disclose all to the vice president, Cheney said, "You don't have to. I know you didn't do it."
Cheney's incuriosity went further. When Libby told the vice president that he had discovered a note in his files indicating that in early June 2003, Cheney had told him that Wilson's wife worked at the CIA's Counterproliferation Division (a unit in the agency's clandestine operations directorate), the vice president barely reacted. The note was a big deal. Libby was claiming he had known nothing about Wilson's wife until his conversation with Russert. But here was indisputable documentation that Cheney had informed Libby weeks before that--and proof that Cheney had been gathering his own information on the Wilsons and the trip Joseph Wilson took to Niger for the CIA to check out the allegation that Iraq had sought uranium there.
What did Cheney say when told about the existence of this note? Fitzgerald asked. "He didn't say much," Libby replied, adding that Cheney "titled his head...and that was that." Tilted his head? What did that mean? Libby had no more of an explanation. He also testified that in the days before the leak occurred he and Cheney had discussed many aspects of Wilson's trip to Niger but that the "only part" of the controversy they had not talked about was Wilson's wife and her CIA employment. (When journalists in the media room heard Libby make this claim, several laughed.)
Libby's grand jury testimony contained other intriguing nuggets. At one point, he noted that then-Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz had leaked portions of the National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq's WMDs to the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal. This happened after Cheney had asked Libby to get this information to the Journal. (The NIE selections may or may not have been classified at the time: it's complicated.) Libby, in turn, talked to Wolfowitz about doing so because he didn't "have as good a relationship with the Wall Street Journal as Secretary Wolfowitz did." (When the Journal ran an editorial quoting the NIE and insisting that Bush had been right to cite Iraq's alleged attempt to buy uranium in Africa, the paper's editorialists asserted "this information...does not come from the White House.")
And in his grand jury testimony, Libby noted that both he and Cheney believed that Joe Wilson (news, bio, voting record) had been "qualified" for his mission to Africa. White House allies have long derided Wilson as an absurd choice for the trip. Will they retract that criticism? Or do they believe Libby was not telling the truth before the grand jury?
<snip>
Link:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/thenation/20070208/cm_thenation/3164130It just keeps on gettin better.
:evilgrin:
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