Cheney Notes on Plame Disclosed

In a new court filing, the prosecutor in the CIA leak case revealed that Vice President Dick Cheney made handwritten references to CIA officer Valerie Plame -- albeit not by name -- before her identity was publicly exposed.

The new court filing is the second in little more than a month by Special Counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald mentioning Cheney as being closely focused with his then-chief of staff, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, on Bush administration critic Joseph C. Wilson IV, who is married to Plame.

With the two court filings, Fitzgerald has pointed to an important role for the vice president in the weeks leading up to the leaking of Plame’s identity.

In the court filing late Friday, Fitzgerald said he intended to introduce at Libby’s trial in January a copy of Wilson’s op-ed article in the New York Times “bearing handwritten notations by the vice president.”

The article was published July 6, 2003, eight days before Plame’s identity was exposed by conservative columnist Robert Novak.

The notations “support the proposition that publication of the Wilson op-ed acutely focused the attention of the vice president and the defendant -- his chief of staff -- on Mr. Wilson, on the assertions made in the article and on responding to those assertions.”

The article containing Cheney’s notes “reflects the contemporaneous reaction of the vice president to Mr. Wilson’s op-ed article,” the prosecutor said. “This is relevant to establishing some of the facts that were viewed as important by the defendant’s immediate superior, including whether Mr. Wilson’s wife had ‘sent him on a junket,’ ” the filing stated.

The reference is to the fact that the CIA sent Wilson on a trip to Africa in 2002 to verify a report that Iraq had made attempts to acquire uranium yellowcake from Niger.

Wilson concluded that it was highly doubtful an agreement to purchase uranium had been made.

The Bush administration used the intelligence on supposed efforts by Iraq to acquire uranium from Africa to bolster its case for going to war.

After the invasion, with the Bush White House under pressure because no weapons of mass destruction had been found in Iraq, Wilson wrote the op-ed piece for the newspaper.

In it, he accused the administration of exaggerating prewar intelligence to overstate an Iraqi threat from weapons of mass destruction.

The prosecution’s court papers also stated that Cheney told Libby around June 12, 2003, that Wilson’s wife worked at the CIA, a month before her identity was publicized.