A Fresh Focus on Cheney - Handwritten notes by the Vice President surface in the Fitzgerald probe.
By Michael Isikoff
The notes, Fitzgerald said in his filing, show that Cheney and Libby were "acutely focused" on the Wilson column and on rebutting his criticisms of the White House's handling of pre-Iraq war intelligence. In the column, which created a firestorm after its publication, Wilson wrote that he had been dispatched by the CIA without pay to Niger in February 2002 to investigate an intelligence report that Iraq was seeking uranium from the African country for a nuclear bomb. Wilson said he was told Cheney had asked about the intelligence, but the White House subsequently ignored his findings debunking the Niger claims.
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Read the Fitzgerald Filing on Cheney Notes
In the margins of the op-ed, Cheney jotted out a series of questions that seemed to challenge many of Wilson's assertions as well as the legitimacy of his CIA-sponsored trip to Africa: "Have they done this sort of thing before? Send an Amb. [sic] to answer a question? Do we ordinarily send people out pro bono to work for us? Or did his wife send him on a junket?"
It is extremely rare, if not unprecedented, for Cheney's own notes to be made public. The notes—apparently obtained as a result of a grand jury subpoena—would appear to make Cheney an even more central witness than had been previously thought in the criminal probe. Fitzgerald's prosecution has created continued problems for the White House. Karl Rove, the President Bush's chief political adviser, recently made his fifth grand jury appearance in the case and remains under scrutiny while Fitzgerald weighs whether to file criminal charges against him. For now, Libby is the only figure charged in the case.
Lea Ann McBride, a spokeswoman for the vice president, declined to comment on the newly disclosed notes. "We continue to cooperate in the investigation as we have since its inception," she said.
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THE NEWS
May 15, 2006 -- Dick Cheney's snarl about privacy. In 1993, having just written a book on data privacy, this editor was invited to give a talk to business students at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia. The venue was a small lecture room adjacent to a larger lecture hall. Simultaneous to my talk, Lynne Cheney was speaking to other students in larger hall next door about "political correctness" on campus -- one of her continuing bugaboos. Following my lecture, I was speaking to some students in the foyer in the lecture building when Dick Cheney, who had accompanied his wife to her lecture, approached me and introduced himself and said he understood I had just given a talk and inquired about the subject. Recalling that the administration of George H. W. Bush, which included Secretary of Defense Cheney, was not a big proponent of privacy, I used the occasion to tell Cheney, "I spoke about privacy and the fact that the United States is severely lagging other industrialized countries, including the newly-freed nations of Eastern Europe, in not passing adequate national privacy legislation." Cheney stared back, sneered with that trademark snarl, and condescendingly replied, "I see."
So now we find that Cheney, in the aftermath of 911, was urging NSA to conduct massive domestic wiretapping and was overruled by NSA attorneys. We also find Cheney's handwritten notes on a copy of Ambassador Joseph Wilson's OP-ED in the New York Times. It was after that Cheney urged a "work up" on Wilson and his CIA covert agent wife. I vividly remember Cheney's snarl at my mention of the constitutional right of privacy in 1993 at a university named for two of Virginia's most famous statesmen-generals. Cheney's presence at W&L then was as much an insult to Washington and Lee as his presence in the White House today is a desecration to every past President and Vice President of the United States.