Pincus: Cheney told Fitz he "had no idea" what Libby knew about Plame - court filings contradict

[sabra]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/11/02/AR2009110203525.html

Dick Cheney and the use of classified information

By WALTER PINCUS


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Another highlight in the FBI report is personal.

Fitzgerald's investigation was an outgrowth of a July 14, 2003, column by Robert Novak. It was written less than a week after former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV went public about being sent to Niger by the CIA in February 2002 to see whether that country had contracted to sell uranium to Saddam Hussein. In his column, Novak named Plame, Wilson's wife; described her as "an agency operative"; and added that two senior administration officials had told him that "Wilson's wife suggested sending him to Niger."

In June 2003, a month before Novak's column was published, I was investigating a line in a Nicholas Kristof column in the New York Times. It reported that, at Cheney's request, the CIA had sent a former U.S. ambassador to Niger and that the ex-ambassador reported back that no uranium sale to Iraq had taken place.

My reporting had me calling Cheney's office on June 8, 9 and 10, 2003, about that reference to the vice president. Libby called me on June 11 and told me on background, so I could not identify him by name in a story, that Cheney had not known of the former ambassador's trip and did not request it. Libby made no mention of Wilson's wife, and she played no part in my June 12, 2003, story about Wilson's trip.

Questioned in 2004 by Fitzgerald, Cheney said he could not remember when he was first told that Plame was Wilson's wife, although he thought he learned it from then-CIA Director George J. Tenet in June 2003. Cheney also said he "had no idea" what Libby knew about Plame before Novak's July 14 column.

There has not been enough time to check all of Cheney's statements to Fitzgerald that day, but this one I already knew. A court filing by Fitzgerald released in 2007 reads: "Defendant (Libby) testified before the grand jury that he could have been a source for Walter Pincus's June 12, 2003 article, and that it was during preparation for providing information to Mr. Pincus that the Vice President informed him that former Ambassador Wilson's wife worked at the CIA."

[TacticalPeek]

1. Somebody's lying.

Again.