The Smoking Pen By Dan Froomkin

The Smoking Pen

By Dan Froomkin
Special to washingtonpost.com
Monday, May 15, 2006; 1:15 PM

Handwritten notes from Vice President Cheney once and for all place the vice president at the epicenter of a scandal that still threatens to tear apart the Bush White House.

The notes were scrawled in the margins of former U.S. ambassador Joseph Wilson's fateful July 2003 New York Times op-ed piece, in which Wilson described his trip to Niger at the behest of the CIA and criticized the White House for misusing intelligence in the run-up to war in Iraq.

Snip...

In fact, whether it was Cheney's explicit intention or not, two days later Libby and White House political guru Karl Rove were telling reporters that Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, worked at the CIA.

Fitzgerald is said to still be considering filing charges against Rove, whose testimony in the case, like Libby's, has changed dramatically over time.

The notes also offer an insight into Cheney's state of mind. It's an often overlooked aspect of this case that the objective of alerting reporters to the identity of Wilson's wife was to imply that his trip was some sort of nepotistic plum.

Snip...

This is notably not the first time that Cheney himself has been spotted at the nerve center of the Plame case. Rove is said to have initially told the grand jury he first heard about Plame from some reporter -- then he said he heard it from Libby. Libby is said to have initially told the grand jury he first heard about Plame from reporters -- but Libby's own notes showed he first heard about her from Cheney.

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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/linkset/2005/04/11/LI2005041100879.html