Seattle Times: Case not closed on Cheney's role

[Taco John]

Case not closed on Cheney's role
By Paul Richter

Los Angeles Times

WASHINGTON — Vice President Dick Cheney appears as no more than a background character in the indictment of his chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby. Yet even that secondary role raises questions about whether Cheney played any part in the alleged effort to discredit an administration critic.

Indeed, Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald said emphatically Friday that, "We make no allegation that the vice president committed any criminal act."

But as the Libby case moves forward, it is likely to focus more attention on the vice president's position as one of the most-powerful behind-the-scenes figures in government.

The five-count federal indictment says Cheney talked to Libby about the fact that Valerie Plame — the wife of Joseph Wilson, a former U.S. ambassador and administration critic — was a CIA operative. And it suggests that Cheney was close by his chief of staff as Libby took some of the actions that led to the charges of lying and obstruction of justice.

If the case goes to trial, testimony could show whether Cheney had any role in inspiring Libby's alleged decision to unmask Plame. Even if Cheney emerges blameless, the indictment deprives him of a capable and like-minded assistant who helped him carry out his foreign-policy agenda, beginning with the Iraq war.

Cheney has been "splashed by this, though not soaked," said Ross Baker, a political scientist at Rutgers University.

Cheney and Libby have had the closest kind of working relationship, based on a strong mutual admiration.

The two share hawkish foreign-policy views, a wry sense of humor, and a hard-charging style. On Friday, Cheney said he accepted the resignation with "deep regret," and called Libby "one of the most capable and talented individuals I have ever known."

The indictment says that Cheney was the third person, after an unidentified undersecretary of state and a CIA officer, to discuss with Libby the fact that Plame was a CIA officer. It is not illegal for senior officials with security clearances to talk about classified matters. What was illegal, Friday's indictment charged, was the alleged false statements Libby subsequently made about the Wilson affair in interviews with the FBI and testimony before the grand jury investigating the CIA leak case.

Libby's conversation with Cheney took place around June 12, 2003, about the time Libby and unidentified other "officials in the office of the vice president" discussed how to respond to Wilson's allegations that the administration was lying about Iraq's alleged purchase of uranium from Niger, a claim that formed part of President Bush's rationale for invading Iraq.

The indictment hints that Cheney and Libby may have discussed how to handle the Wilson problem and the media coverage of Wilson's charges. It says that on or about July 12, on the return leg of a trip to Norfolk, Va., with Cheney, Libby talked over "with other officials aboard the plane" how Libby should respond to media inquiries, including some from Time magazine reporter Matt Cooper.

The indictment did not indicate whether Cheney participated in that discussion.

Robert Boorstin, a former Clinton administration aide at the Center for American Progress, said that there is little chance these charges will hurt Cheney in his relationship with Bush. Cheney is "still the 800-pound gorilla. ... He's still going to be the last person who whispers into the president's ear."

Still, Boorstin said, it will be hard for Cheney to find a replacement as effective as Libby, and his loss will likely be a blow to morale in the office of the vice president.

The indictment comes at a time that has been difficult for Cheney, analysts noted.

He was one of the earliest and most influential advocates of an Iraq war, which continues to lose public support.

He has come under personal criticism recently as opponents of the war have been emboldened.

Last week, in an article in The New Yorker magazine, retired Gen. Brent Scowcroft, the national-security adviser to President George H.W. Bush, suggested that Cheney had changed greatly since he oversaw the 1991 Persian Gulf War as secretary of defense. "I don't know him anymore," Scowcroft said.

Meanwhile, there are some suggestions that, in his second term, the current president has been more inclined to follow the advice of his secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, and to take a less-hawkish line on issues such as the alleged North Korean and Iranian nuclear-weapons programs.

Copyright © 2005 The Seattle Times Company

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/politics/2002590749_leakcheney29.html

[the Talking Can]

here's another good explanation of why this isn't over yet, from Jane Hamsher:

huffington post (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jane-hamsher/patrick-fitzgerald-brings_b_9733.html)


Patrick Fitzgerald Brings No Joy to Bushville Tonight (17 comments )

Patrick Fitzgerald acquitted himself superbly today. A country weaned on the corrupt, leering hackery of Ken Starr -- who squandered millions of taxpayer dollars in a partisan witch-hunt -- got to watch as a guy with an inner core of decency stood up and spoke frankly about his investigation with professionalism and honesty.
We got to be proud of the Justice Department again. We got to enjoy a moment of confidence that if there is a bottom to be gotten to in all of this there is a man in charge who will honorably and doggedly find it.

But hopes were set high that an array of kleptocratic scalps would be waving in the wind by this time today, and that was not the case. Did we pin them unrealistically on a man and a situation to whom they did not rightfully belong? Perhaps.

But perhaps the only thing in the situation that is wonting is time.

If I were Karl Rove right now, I'd be kicking myself around the room. The thing that got him into this mess in the first place is spinning stuff he didn't need to spin, and it looks like he's done it once again.

Fitzgerald held his cards close today and gave no indication that Rove was on the hook for anything, giving pause to many who were hoping that he would offer some signal that Turd Blossom's goose was yet to be cooked. But on Thursday evening, Rove's people were spinning furiously to everyone who would sit still -- NYT, WSJ, AP -- telling them that Rove was not going to be indicted today, but his attorneys had been told that he was "still under investigation."

Wow. If they'd just shut up, all the talking heads would be chattering today about how Rove was in the clear. Flip on the TV and listen for a while, you'll hear how even partisan wonks like Andrea Mitchell and Bob Woodward -- who are certainly parroting every other talking point Unka Karl sent them out with today -- are still not saying that Rove is in the clear. They don't know what the heck to say. Fitzgerald has thrown them all for a loop.

So what are we to make of all of this? Well, consider:

1. Although Fitzgerald gave little away today (much to the exasperation of those whose continued liberty depends on accurately reading him), he let it be known that he could not investigate the underlying claims of violations of the Identities Protection Act because another crime was being committed that prevented him from doing so, of which Scooter Libby now stands accused.

2. He's not done. As he said, "We recognize that we want to get this thing done. I will not end the investigation until I can look anyone in the eye and tell them that we have carried out our responsibility sufficiently to be sure that we've done what we could to make intelligent decisions about when to end the investigation."

3. In the Libby indictment most individuals who are cited as witnesses are indicated by their job title -- Assistant to the Vice President for Public Affairs, Under Secretary of State, White House Press Secretary (guess that explains where Ari Fleischer's been in all this, he's a cooperating witness). The exception is the anonymous "Official A," who purportedly spoke with Robert Novak in the week prior to July 11, 2003 (p. 8, pp 21). That's a distinction you would make if you were still investigating someone and you did not want to prejudice that investigation. AP is reporting that three people have now identified "Official A" as Karl Rove.

4. When pressed about why members of the press (read: Robert Novak) could not discuss their dealings with the grand jury openly, Fitzgerald said he had requested that they remain circumspect so as not to compromise the investigation. But when asked later whether this now meant that they were released from this obligation, it was the only time I saw Fitzgerald waffle during the press conference -- he wasn't prepared for that one, and he said he couldn't answer. If the investigation were really over, then why not? Wouldn't he want to free everyone in the press up as soon as possible to tell their stories?

5. As Billmon noted, there is reason to believe that Fitzgerald had enough evidence to go after Libby under the Identities Protection Act. Why didn't he? Especially since the one time Fitzgerald stepped beyond his role as Special Counsel to editorialize was when he underscored the damage that had been done to the intelligence community by the outing of Plame. This guy probably hugs the Patriot Act in his sleep. He is a total law'n'order true believer. He would not pull his punches on that front, and has in the past been extremely aggressive -- some would say draconian -- in protecting what he saw as threats to the national security.

As it stands now, Fitzgerald has Libby on 30 years worth of counts and he's got him cold. No wiggle room. Libby may not do 30 years, but he ain't doing 6 months. Scooter's screwed. It was the Vice President's boon companion himself, David Gergen, who said on MSNBC today that this is squeeze time. John Dean reiterated it later on. It really matters little to a man of 55 whether he is looking at 30 years or 60 -- he'd rather have 60 thrown at him if some of them were shaky and he thought he could use the wobbly ones to get out of the rest.

There is no wobble in the indictments handed down today. It's pretty clear. Libby can cut a deal with Fitzgerald or swing.

Which brings us to David Radler. Who is David Radler? David Radler was the number two man at Hollinger International. The day after he was indicted by the US Attorney for Northern Illinois Patrick J. Fitzgerald for liberating large sums of cash from the stockholders of Hollinger, he announced he'd rather "cooperate with investigators" (read: rat out his boss, Conrad Black) than spend the rest of his life perfecting the ultimate starch job in the prison laundry. Radler decided he would take door number three and do twenty-nine unpleasant months and pay a fine when the prospect of life in prison became a reality.

That's just the way Patrick Fitzgerald works. If the Hollinger case, and the Ryan case, and the Daley Case, and the Al Quaeda case and the Gambino case are any indication, Fitzgerald will now use what he's got to get more.

So if I were Dick Cheney, I wouldn't be sleeping very easy tonight. At the very best, his chief of staff was just popped for lying to protect him, and he can now look forward to being questioned in open court. Do you think Andrea Mitchell could spare some TV time from mewling over what a loss it will be not to have Scooter in the Hamptons during the summer season to discuss the serious implications of the Vice President's role in this highly dubious affair? Well probably not, but if there's a God in his heaven tonight the tightly-stretched skin of her face will soon snap and whiplash her into inactivity.

Do not make this mistake of thinking a presidential pardon will be a panacea for those involved. Fitzgerald's honorable and straightforward presentation today made it nigh impossible for the Rovians to fall back on their old tricks and launch a smear campaign -- Chris Matthews pretty near crowned him Pope this afternoon, and any attempt at a pardon will just make Bush look like an impeachment-worthy crook out to thwart the efforts of an honest public servant.

All the solutions that have worked so well for Team Bush in the past only serve to complicate things now. The only successful strategy to use with an honest prosecutor is honesty. I wonder how long it will take them to think of it?

[patteeu]

...you'll hear how even partisan wonks like Andrea Mitchell and Bob Woodward...

Partisan wonks? On which side are these guys supposed to be partisan? I'm guessing Jane is so far out on the fringe that she sees Mitchell and Woodward as Republican sympathizers, which is ridiculous.

It was the Vice President's boon companion himself, David Gergen, who said on MSNBC today that this is squeeze time.

Boon companion? LOL. I wouldn't be surprised if Cheney and Gergen get along when they run into each other at a social gathering, but their politics aren't close at all. Gergen is to the Republican party what Mr. Kotter is to the democrats. From Jane's perspective, Hillary is probably a neocon.

[Taco John]

In Indictment's Wake, a Focus on Cheney's Powerful Role


By ELISABETH BUMILLER and ERIC SCHMITT
Published: October 30, 2005


WASHINGTON, Oct. 29 - Vice President Dick Cheney makes only three brief appearances in the 22-page federal indictment that charges his chief of staff, I. Lewis Libby, with lying to investigators and misleading a grand jury in the C.I.A. leak case. But in its clear, cold language, it lifts a veil on how aggressively Mr. Cheney's office drove the rationale against Saddam Hussein and then fought to discredit the Iraq war's critics.

The document now raises a central question: how much collateral damage has Mr. Cheney sustained?

Many Republicans say that Mr. Cheney, already politically weakened because of his role in preparing the case for war, could be further damaged if he is forced to testify about the infighting over intelligence that turned out to be false. At the least, they say, his office will be temporarily off balance with the resignation of Mr. Libby, who controlled both foreign and domestic affairs in a vice presidential office that has served as a major policy arm for the West Wing.

"Cheney has had a tight, effective team, and they have been an incredible support system for the presidency," said Rich Bond, a former chairman of the Republican National Committee. "To the degree that that support system is weakened, it's a bad day at the office. But no person is indispensable." For now, David Addington, the vice president's counsel, is the leading candidate to replace Mr. Libby.

Mr. Cheney's allies noted that there was no suggestion in the indictment that the most powerful vice president in American history, with enormous influence into all important corners of administration policy, had done anything wrong. They also said that Mr. Libby, whose role has been diminished in the past year as Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice became more powerful and the leak investigation took its toll, could be quickly replaced from the vice president's large Rolodex of support.

"His reach within both the party mechanism and the policy structures of the government is so deep that I believe that it is possible to find somebody who would provide the technical and intellectual support that Libby did, even if he doesn't have the same personal relationship that he had with Libby," said Tom Rath, a New Hampshire Republican with White House ties. "That's very hard to duplicate."

The indictment against Mr. Libby, known as Scooter, alleges that the vice president's office was the hub of a concerted effort to gather information about key critics of the Bush Iraq policy.

The larger question, Republicans said, was Mr. Cheney's standing with the public - and what his staff has often called the vice president's constituency of one, Mr. Bush.

Christine Todd Whitman, the president's former EPA administrator and a longtime Bush family friend who was critical of the White House and the Republican right wing in a recent book, said that she did not expect the president's personal relationship with Mr. Cheney to change. Nonetheless, she said she believed that if more information about Mr. Cheney's involvement in the leak case becomes public, "and if it keeps hanging around and getting close to the vice president, he might step aside - but that's an extreme case."

For now, she said, "Scooter has fallen on his sword, and the focus is on him."

Paul Light, a vice presidential scholar at New York University's Wagner Graduate School of Public Service, agreed that Mr. Cheney's relationship with Mr. Bush will likely remain solid, but the taint of the scandal could hurt the vice president outside the White House.

"Cheney becomes a bit of an albatross except with the base, where he's a real rock star," Mr. Light said. "It'll be less possible for him to make campaign trips because this issue will dog him."

A number of influential Republicans agreed, although they did not want to speak for attribution for fear of harming their relationships with Mr. Cheney.

"Cheney doesn't have a legal problem, but he has a political problem," said one Republican close to the White House who did not want to be named to avoid public quarrels with the White House. "As the driving force on foreign policy and the Iraq war, his leadership is now nowhere near as credible. Bush has got to approach the stuff coming from the vice president's office with raised eyebrows."

Others said that Mr. Cheney was far too central at the White House to be diminished by the scandal. "He's a survivor of all time," said Alan Simpson, a former Republican senator from Wyoming and a longtime friend of the vice president. "I never saw him bow his head or go into a cocoon or suck his thumb or anything like that. He's an unflappable man."

Former Senator Warren B. Rudman, Republican of New Hampshire, agreed with that assessment. "Look, Dick Cheney is not running for anything, he's obviously an incredibly important person in the administration, and I don't think that will change inside the White House," Mr. Rudman said. "If he were a normal vice president looking to run in '08, then it would be a totally different situation."

Most Republicans said that they had not taken seriously recent talk, advanced by conservatives, that Mr. Cheney should be the next Republican presidential candidate. In any case, they said, his history of heart problems, the faulty pre-war intelligence and now Mr. Libby's indictment effectively ruled out a political future beyond Mr. Bush's second term. "He's too controversial," Ms. Whitman said.

Although Mr. Cheney makes only three appearances in the indictment, the episodes tell a story of a vice president directly involved in an effort to learn about Joseph C. Wilson IV, a former diplomat who emerged in 2003 as a critic of the way the administration used prewar intelligence to justify the invasion of Iraq. The episodes do not shed light on the action that set off the special prosecutor nearly two years ago: who first leaked the name of Mr. Wilson's wife, Valerie Wilson, an undercover officer at the C.I.A., as an attempt to denigrate Mr. Wilson's trip as a nepotistic junket arranged by his spouse.

Mr. Cheney's most interesting appearance in the indictment is on Page 5, where he is described as telling Mr. Libby, on June 12, 2003, that Mr. Wilson's wife worked at the C.I.A. in the counterproliferation division. "Libby understood that the vice president had learned this information from the C.I.A.," the indictment states.

Mr. Cheney also appears on Page 8, when he flew with Mr. Libby and others on Air Force Two on July 12, 2003, to Norfolk, Va. On the return trip, the indictment states, Mr. Libby "discussed with other officials aboard the plane" what he should say to reporters in response to "certain pending media inquiries," including questions from Matthew Cooper of Time magazine.

The indictment does not say who the "other officials" are or the nature of the media inquiries, but it does say that on that same day Mr. Libby spoke to Mr. Cooper, and that he confirmed that he had heard that Mr. Wilson's wife was involved in sending him on the trip.

The indictment comes as other parts of the wall that was built around Mr. Cheney's defense of the war have come tumbling down. Earlier this month, Lawrence Wilkerson, the former chief of staff to Colin L. Powell while he was secretary of state, complained in a speech of a "cabal" between Mr. Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld when it came to Iraq and of a "real dysfunctionality" in the administration's foreign policy team.

The indictment also serves as fresh evidence to those Republicans who have known Mr. Cheney for decades and say he has changed, and that he reacted to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, by becoming consumed with threats against the nation and his long-time desire to rid Iraq of Mr. Hussein. Brent Scowcroft, the national security adviser to the first President Bush, said as much in The New Yorker's current issue.

"I consider Cheney a good friend - I've known him for thirty years," Mr. Scowcroft told Jeffrey Goldberg. "But Dick Cheney I don't know anymore."

Some Republicans say that Mr. Cheney's relationship with Mr. Bush has already changed, and that he has become less of a mentor to the president after Mr. Bush's nearly five years in office. Still, Mr. Cheney's allies insist that, with or without Mr. Libby, Mr. Cheney will be at the president's side.

"I don't think it's ever been about Cheney's staff," said Victoria Clarke, a former Pentagon spokeswoman and aide to President George H. W. Bush. "It's about him. Cheney's influence has always been his own."

[Taco John]

Many folks here know I hold Dick Morris in high regard as far as insiders go...

Dick Morris Says Libby Indictment Implicates Cheney…

On Fox News, former presidential advisor Dick Morris says today’s events don’t bode well for Dick Cheney:

JOHN GIBSON: How bad is this damage? And what does the president need to control it, Dick?
DICK MORRIS: Well, it depends on whether we are just talking about Libby. If the prosecutor is happy with an indictment of him, a conviction, and that scalp on the wall is sufficient for him, then it just goes away. It’s one bad chapter and it passes.

But it is very possible that the prosecutor looks up the food chain to Vice President Cheney. These investigations have a way of rising. And according to the terms of the indictment, Cheney told Libby about Valerie Plame and then Libby lied to the grand jury about how he found about it, saying that he got it from a reporter. Well, if that’s the case, the vice president knew that Libby was lying.

http://thinkprogress.org/2005/10/28/morris-cheney/

[the Talking Can]

Libby was a loyal soldier.

He'll be employed by Halliburton in no time. Err...after 30 years in jail.

[Ugly Duck]

Lawrence Wilkerson, the former chief of staff to Colin L. Powell while he was secretary of state, complained in a speech of a "cabal" between Mr. Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld when it came to Iraq and of a "real dysfunctionality" in the administration's foreign policy team.Hey... that was my term for the Neocon bosses that are in charge! And you guyz thought I wuzza wacko! Cheney is as high as you can go in this corrupt administration. The oval office is empty save for the bozo that reads whatever the Cabal hands him to read. Bring down Cheney, and you bring down the most powerful man in the country. This is downright nixonian.