Cheney Implicated in CIA Leak Probe (bradblog 5/17)

cont'd: http://www.bradblog.com/

Wednesday, May 17th 2006


VIDEO - Cheney Implicated in CIA Leak Probe and Smearing Joe Wilson
Guest blogged by David Edwards of Veredictum.com


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Hidden amongst the smoke and mirrors of Bush's plan to boost sinking poll numbers, pander to his base enact immigration reform, the media largely missed revelations that Vice President Dick Cheney has been directly implicated in the CIA leak case.

MSNBC's Countdown managed to sneak in this short report about the new details of Cheney's involvement. My apologies for not posting this video sooner but the issue is still relevant and deserves further scrutiny.

A recent court filing by Patrick Fitzgerald includes Cheney's handwritten notes on a copy of Joe Wilson's July 6, 2003 New York Times op-ed. According to Fitzgerald, the handwritten notes show "the contemporaneous reaction of the vice president". In his notes, Cheney writes talking points that are later leaked to the press and used to smear Joe Wilson.

Christy Harden Smith of Firedoglake writes,

:nuke:

He makes it way too spicy.

Of course, they talked about this and planned their attack.

Common sense.

Was there a schedule?

Did I miss the memo?

It wouldn't surprise me at all. And that could explain why the indictment of last Friday might be in limbo -- at the last moment, Rover decided to sing like a birdie.

On Monday, I'm watching the CNN crawl. Barely a peep from CNN or MSNBC. Eh, no biggie...'cause did you hear? The PRESIDENT is ADDRESSING THE NATION!!!! Honestly, Wolfie must have brought his entire wardrobe because he was creaming in his pants the entire day! (That countdown clock was the real cherry on top, though)

So, I figured, Tuesday. That's the day! NOPE! A mention or two, again as if no biggie. WTF???

I've been away for a few days and I figured DU was probably burning up the bandwidth on this. I was dying to get in here and see (in spite of Comcast dragging to a crawl lately)! I expected to see it get at least half of the attention at DU as Colbert. :shrug:

Maybe...Just maybe this will go hand in hand with an announcement of Rove being indicted. Bye-bye Cons and Bush! :woohoo:

Why is this rabbit smiling?

... is an actual story. There's something there. Notes. In actual DickScript.

But my lawyer (this guy)

Tells me that there's no there there. No crime seems to jump out. Motive? Maybe? Exhortation to Scooter? Maybe. But a crime?

Not yet.

But well see when we see, won't we.

All in all, this makes for a nice day.

From the OP link:

In an interview on MSNBC, Richard Wolfe of Newsweek, went even further by leaving no doubt that Cheney's notes on Wilson's opinion article were actually "an order" directing his staff to push Cheney's loaded questions to friendly journalists...

OLBERMANN: There's a timeline problem now, isn't there? I mean, the prosecution said that the vice president and Mr. Libby had started putting together this full workup on Joe Wilson trip and that started in the middle of June 2003 and that's a couple of weeks before the op-ed was published. The ambassador was supposed to be shopping around. Why would Mr. Cheney be jotting down questions on the printed copy of the article... when he was supposed to have already known the answer to those questions?

WOLFE: Because the questions are an order. He's prompting his own staff to go and spin those lines. In fact, that's some of the language -- the "junket" language -- was exactly what was spun out to reports about the op-ed, about Joe Wilson. So, its' not so much a question to be answered, it's a question to be put out there to particularly favored reporters and columnist. And that's exactly what's happened. That the conspiracy here and I expect that's why people like Libby were trying to cover it up. Because they knew this was a smear tactic.



So the real question is, just how many laws did Cheney break in this scandal?