It sounds like a coverup. Or is it? Should we believe Cheney, the wily VP, who has been an outspoken critic of the Obama Administration? Mmmm. I’m sure plenty people have opinions on whether he’s being on the up and up.
By Barton Gellman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Former vice president Richard B. Cheney told a special prosecutor in 2004 that he was unable to recall his role in most of the pivotal events that led to the uncloaking of a clandestine CIA officer in the run-up to the Iraq war, according to newly released FBI records.
A question-by-question summary of Cheney’s May 8, 2004, interview with Special Counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald, made public under court order after years of legal maneuvering to keep it secret, portrays a vice president in command of few clear memories about a case that led to great embarrassment for the White House and felony convictions for his chief of staff.
Fitzgerald declared in his closing arguments that I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby’s perjury and obstruction of justice left him unable to pierce “a cloud over the vice president.”
Cheney neither denied nor acknowledged any memory of directing Libby, his chief of staff, to tell reporters that Valerie Plame, the wife of a prominent war critic, was a CIA officer. Nor did he recall any conversation with Libby in which either man referred to their mutual suspicion that Plame had helped dispatch her husband, Joseph C. Wilson IV, on “a junket” to explore White House accusations that then-Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein had tried to buy uranium from Niger for a nuclear weapon.
Dozens of questions from Fitzgerald produced the same result.
