Thursday, May 25, 2006

Libby Told Grand Jury Cheney Spoke of Plame

Dick Cheney was "angered" by Joe Wilson's newspaper column, attacking the governments claims that Saddam attempted to obtain uranium from Niger, and directed Scooter Libby to "get all the facts out" according to evidence released by Patrick Fitzgerald yesterday.

"The state of mind of the Vice President as communicated to defendant is directly relevant to the issue of whether defendant knowingly made false statements to federal agents and the grand jury regarding when and how he learned about Ms. Wilson's employment and what he said to reporters regarding this issue," he said.

The prosecutor also left open the possibility that Cheney will be called as a witness at Libby's trial, scheduled to begin next year, and denied an assertion last week by Libby's lawyers that Cheney would not be called.

Fitzgerald has been making the case that the White House were obsessed with rebutting Joe Wilson's case as a way of undermining Libby's defence that simple memory lapses were responsible for his false evidence.

According to the excerpts from testimony on March 5, 2004, Libby recalled that he and Cheney discussed Wilson's article on multiple occasions each day after it appeared. Cheney, Libby said, "often will cut out from a newspaper an article using a little penknife that he has" and "look at it, think about it."

That's what Cheney did with the column, Libby said, because Cheney saw it as attacking his credibility. "He wanted to get all the facts out about what he had or hadn't done, what the facts were or were not. He was very keen about that and said it repeatedly. Let's get everything out," Libby testified.

Only Cheney would carve things out with a penknife rather than use a pair of scissors. Scissors are probably not manly enough. The penknife is still slightly disappointing. I'd have expected a machete.

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