Speculation about the Plame Affair reaches all the way to the vice president
by James Ridgeway October 25th, 2005 9:50 AM WASHINGTON, D.C.—As the tenure runs out for the grand jury in the Valerie Plame leak case this week, the bottom line question is not so much whether Bush administration insiders I. Lewis Libby and/or Karl Rove will get indicted, but whether special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald’s investigation will reach Vice President Dick Cheney himself. Rove and Libby, Cheney's chief of staff, have been notified that they are at serious legal risk in the inquiry. Tuesday's New York Times reports that Libby learned about Plame, a covert CIA officer and wife of administration critic Joe Wilson, from talking with Cheney. According to the Times, this new revelation, drawn from "notes of the previously undisclosed conversation" between the two, contradicts Libby's testimony to the grand jury.
"It would not be illegal for either Mr. Cheney or Mr. Libby, both of whom are presumably cleared to know the government's deepest secrets, to discuss a C.I.A. officer or her link to a critic of the administration," the Times explains. "But any effort by Mr. Libby to steer investigators away from his conversation with Mr. Cheney could be considered . . . an illegal effort to impede the inquiry."
by James Ridgeway October 25th, 2005 9:50 AM WASHINGTON, D.C.—As the tenure runs out for the grand jury in the Valerie Plame leak case this week, the bottom line question is not so much whether Bush administration insiders I. Lewis Libby and/or Karl Rove will get indicted, but whether special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald’s investigation will reach Vice President Dick Cheney himself. Rove and Libby, Cheney's chief of staff, have been notified that they are at serious legal risk in the inquiry. Tuesday's New York Times reports that Libby learned about Plame, a covert CIA officer and wife of administration critic Joe Wilson, from talking with Cheney. According to the Times, this new revelation, drawn from "notes of the previously undisclosed conversation" between the two, contradicts Libby's testimony to the grand jury.
"It would not be illegal for either Mr. Cheney or Mr. Libby, both of whom are presumably cleared to know the government's deepest secrets, to discuss a C.I.A. officer or her link to a critic of the administration," the Times explains. "But any effort by Mr. Libby to steer investigators away from his conversation with Mr. Cheney could be considered . . . an illegal effort to impede the inquiry."
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