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Report: Some Bush officials suspected Libby helped cover-up for Cheney

By Ron Brynaert

Published: July 23, 2009
Updated 7 months ago




Update (at bottom): Cheney defends Libby, blames Armitage for Plame leak

Buried near the end of a bizarre Time article which compares Obama administration debates about whether to probe torture allegations with President Bush’s struggle to decide whether or not to pardon a former aide who obstructed a leak investigation are two paragraphs which reveal something new about L ‘affaire Plame.

Valerie Plame first became a household name when her identity was disclosed by conservative columnist Robert Novak on July 14, 2003. The column came only a week after her husband, former ambassador Joseph Wilson, had written an op-ed for the New York Times asserting that White House officials twisted pre-war intelligence on Iraq. Her outing was seen as political retaliation for Wilson’s criticism of the Administration’s claim that Iraq sought uranium from Niger for a nuclear weapons program.

But now it turns out that it wasn’t just liberal bloggers and left-leaning Democrats that suspected former vice president Dick Cheney had engaged in a cover-up. According to Time, there were apparently some empty tin foil containers in the wastebaskets of the West Wing, as well.

A former Bush aide even tells the magazine that deep down, the president himself probably suspected that there was a cover-up.

From the Time article:

And there was a darker possibility. As a former Bush senior aide explains, “I’m sure the President and [chief of staff] Josh [Bolten] and Fred had a concern that somewhere, deep in there, there was a cover-up.” It had been an article of faith among Cheney’s critics that the Vice President wanted a pardon for Libby because Libby had taken the fall for him in the Fitzgerald probe. In his grand-jury testimony reviewed by TIME, Libby denied three times that Cheney had directed him to leak Plame’s CIA identity in mid-2003. Though his recollection of other events in the same time frame was lucid and detailed, on at least 20 occasions, Libby could not recall details of his talks with Cheney about Plame’s place of employment or questions the Vice President raised privately about Wilson’s credibility. Some Bush officials wondered whether Libby was covering up for Cheney’s involvement in the leak of Plame’s identity.

That meant taking up the pardon question again was, as a West Wing veteran put it later, like passing a kidney stone — for the second time. Bolten declined to take a stand, according to several associates. Instead, he lateraled the issue to Fielding, claiming that a legal, not a political, call was required. If the counsel’s office decided a pardon wasn’t merited, says an official involved in the discussions, everyone else would have cover with Cheney. “They could say, Our hands are tied — our lawyers said the guy was guilty.”

Was there a cover up as the aides believed? Were top Bush aides right in believing that Libby had perjured himself to protect Cheney?

On Dec. 13, 2009, as Cheney was pressing Bush to make the pardon, investigative reporter Murray Waas disclosed portions of Cheney’s still secret FBI report strongly suggesting that Cheney himself had made admissions to the CIA leak prosecutor admitting wrongdoing.

The story said:

Vice President Dick Cheney, according to a still-highly confidential FBI report, admitted to federal investigators that he rewrote talking points for the press in July 2003 that made it much more likely that the role of then-covert CIA-officer Valerie Plame in sending her husband on a CIA-sponsored mission to Africa would come to light.

Cheney conceded during his interview with federal investigators that in drawing attention to Plame’s role in arranging her husband’s Africa trip reporters might also unmask her role as CIA officer.

[I]nvestigators came away from their interview with Cheney believing that he had not given them a plausible explanation as to how he could focus attention on Plame’s role in arranging her husband’s trip without her CIA status also possibly publicly exposed. At the time, Plame was a covert CIA officer involved in preventing Iran from obtaining weapons of mass destruction, and Cheney’s office played a central role in exposing her and nullifying much of her work.

Cheney revised the talking points on July 8, 2003– the very same day that his then-chief of staff, I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby, met with New York Times reporter Judith Miller and told Miller that Plame was a CIA officer and that Plame had also played a central role in sending her husband on his CIA sponsored trip to the African nation of Niger.

Both Cheney and Libby have acknowledged that Cheney directed him to meet with Miller, but claimed that the purpose of that meeting was to leak other sensitive intelligence to discredit allegations made by Plame’s husband, former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, that the Bush administration misrepresented intelligence information to go to war with Iraq, rather than to leak Plame’s identity.

That Cheney, by his own admission, had revised the talking points in an effort to have the reporters examine who sent Wilson on the very same day that his chief of staff was disclosing to Miller Plame’s identity as a CIA officer may be the most compelling evidence to date that Cheney himself might have directed Libby to disclose Plame’s identity to Miller and other reporters.

This new information adds to a growing body of evidence that Cheney may have directed Libby to disclose Plame’s identity to reporters and that Libby acted to protect Cheney by lying to federal investigators and a federal grand jury about the matter.

In February, Tom Defrank of the N.Y. Daily News first disclosed the rift between Bush and Cheney over’s Bush’s refusal to pardon Libby. The News story quoted one former Bush administration official saying: “He went to the mat and came back and back and back at Bush. He was trying the day before Obama was sworn in.”

When the pardon didn’t come, Cheney was furious at Bush: “He’s furious with Bush.”

The new Time article also reports that “[i]n private, [former President Bush] was bothered by Libby’s lack of repentance.”

Time reports,

On Saturday, Jan. 17, with less than 72 hours left in the Bush presidency, Libby and Fielding and a deputy met for lunch at a seafood restaurant three blocks from the White House. Again Libby insisted on his innocence. No one’s memory is perfect, he argued; to convict me for not remembering something precisely was unfair. Fielding kept listening for signs of remorse. But none came. Fielding reported the conversation to Bush.

Now that the Supreme Court closed the lid on Plame’s lawsuit, the alleged cover-up may never be fully exposed. As Fox News noted last month, the court’s decision was “a victory for Cheney and his former chief of staff, I. Lewis ‘Scooter’ Libby, former White House Chief of Staff Karl Rove, and former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage.”

Update: Cheney defends Libby, blames Armitage for Plame leak

Former Vice President Cheney, responding to the Time article said the following in a media advisory Thursday afternoon:

“Scooter Libby is an innocent man who was the victim of a severe miscarriage of justice. He was not the source of the leak of Valerie Plame’s name. Former Deputy Secretary of State, Rich Armitage, leaked the name and hid that fact from most of his colleagues, including the President. Mr. Libby is an honorable man and a faithful public servant who served the President, the Vice President and the nation with distinction for many years. He deserved a presidential pardon.”

(Editor’s Note: Article originally mistakenly said Libby went to jail. In fact, Bush commuted his jail sentence.)





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