New Details Revealed on CIA Leak Case
By David Johnston
The New York Times
Saturday 04 February 2006
Washington - Vice President ***** Cheney's former chief of staff
told prosecutors that Mr. Cheney had informed him "in an off sort of
curiosity sort of fashion" in mid-June 2003 about the identity of the
CIA officer at the heart of the leak case, according to a formerly
secret legal opinion, parts of which were made public on Friday.
The newly released pages were part of a legal opinion written in
February 2005 by Judge David S. Tatel of the United States Court of
Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. His opinion disclosed
that the former chief of staff, I. Lewis Libby Jr., acknowledged to
prosecutors that he had heard directly from Mr. Cheney about the
Central Intelligence Agency officer, Valerie Wilson, more than a
month before her identity was first publicly disclosed on July 14,
2003, by a newspaper columnist.
"Nevertheless," Judge Tatel wrote, "Libby maintains that he was
learning about Wilson's wife's identity for the first time when he
spoke with NBC Washington Bureau Chief Tim Russert on July 10 or 11."
Mr. Russert denied Mr. Libby's account. Ms. Wilson is married to
Joseph C. Wilson IV, a former ambassador who has criticized the Bush
administration's Iraq policy.
Over all, the new material amplified and provided new details on
charges outlined in the October 2005 indictment against Mr. Libby.
The indictment accused Mr. Libby of falsely telling investigators
that he had first learned about Ms. Wilson from reporters, when he
had, according to the charging document, learned of it from other
government officials like Mr. Cheney.
Mr. Libby appeared in federal court in Washington on Friday for
the first time in several months. A federal trial judge, Reggie B.
Walton, set a calendar that means Mr. Libby's trial will not begin
for at least 11 months, with jury selection to begin on Jan. 8, 2007.
Judge Walton had hoped to start the trial in the fall of 2006 but
Mr. Libby's chief lawyer, Theodore V. Wells Jr., said he would be
involved in another trial at that time.
Judge Tatel's comments in the formerly secret legal opinion were
largely drawn from affidavits supplied by the special counsel in the
case, Patrick J. Fitzgerald, that were written nearly two years ago,
in August 2004. At that time, Mr. Fitzgerald was seeking to compel
grand jury testimony from two reporters, Judith Miller, then a
reporter for The New York Times, and Matthew Cooper, a reporter for
Time magazine.
By that point, the newly disclosed pages showed, Mr. Fitzgerald
had centered his inquiry on possible perjury charges against Mr.
Libby, although that was not publicly known at the time. Mr.
Fitzgerald had abandoned a prosecution based on a federal law that
makes it a crime to disclose the identity of a covert officer at the
CIA Such charges, Judge Tatel wrote, were "currently off the table
for lack of evidence."
Judge Tatel wrote his opinion as part of a unanimous decision by
the three-judge panel which ruled on Feb. 15, 2005, that Ms. Miller
and Mr. Cooper had potentially vital evidentiary information and
could not refuse to testify to the grand jury in the leak case on
First Amendment grounds.
In a separate affidavit filed by Mr. Fitzgerald and disclosed
Friday, the prosecutor wrote that Mr. Libby had testified that he had
forgotten the conversation with Mr. Cheney when he talked to Mr.
Russert. "Further according to Mr. Libby, he did not recall his
conversation with the Vice President even when Russert allegedly told
him about Wilson's wife's employment."
About eight pages of Judge Tatel's concurring opinion were
deleted from the opinion released in 2005. After Mr. Libby's
indictment, lawyers for The Wall Street Journal went to court and
succeeded in obtaining the material released Friday by order of the
same three-judge panel.
Not all of the previously withheld material was released. Several
pages, which apparently contained information about Mr. Fitzgerald's
investigation of Karl Rove, the senior White House adviser, remained
under seal. Mr. Rove has not been charged, but remains under
investigation although his lawyer has expressed confidence that Mr.
Rove will be cleared.
The release of new material represented an important First
Amendment ruling for the right of public access to court records,
said Theodore J. Boutros Jr., a lawyer for The Journal. "We're
pleased that the court recognized that grand jury secrecy is not
absolute and that there's an important public interest in the public
being able to scrutinize the basis for a judicial decision."
The newly disclosed information provides new details about other
events, like a previously reported lunch on July 7, 2003, in which
Mr. Libby told Ari Fleischer, then the White House press secretary,
about Ms. Wilson.
In his opinion, Judge Tatel said that Mr. Fleischer said that Mr.
Libby had told him that Ms. Wilson sent had her husband on a trip to
Africa to examine intelligence reports indicating that Iraq had
sought to buy uranium ore from Niger.
Judge Tatel wrote that Mr. Fleischer had described the lunch to
prosecutors as having been "kind of weird" and had noted that Mr.
Libby typically "operated in a very closed-lip fashion." Judge Tatel
added: "Fleischer recalled that Libby 'added something along the
lines of, you know, this is hush hush, nobody knows about this. This
is on the q.t.' "
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/020406X.shtml
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