According to recent court filings, [tag]Patrick Fitzgerald[/tag] apparently believes [tag]Dick Cheney[/tag] should testify in [tag]Scooter Libby[/tag]’s criminal trial. As the NYT put it, a filing “underscored the prosecutor’s contention that the vice president’s role was critical to understanding Mr. Libby’s wrongdoing,” and is the first indication that Cheney himself might be called as a government witness.
News accounts this morning suggest Cheney could be called to authenticate his handwritten notes on Joseph Wilson’s critical 2003 NYT op-ed, but there may be even more to it that this. Salon’s Tim Grieve noted [tag]Fitzgerald[/tag]’s court filings make clear that he’d like to put [tag]Cheney[/tag] on the stand in order to “question him about the conversations he had with [tag]Libby[/tag] about [tag]Wilson[/tag]’s column, and in the process to undercut Libby’s claim that those conversations didn’t involve the identity of Wilson’s wife.”
And according to a front-page piece in the WaPo, the conversations between Libby and Cheney got pretty interesting.
Vice President Cheney was personally angered by a former U.S. ambassador’s newspaper column attacking a key rationale for the war in Iraq and repeatedly directed I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, then his chief of staff, to “get all the facts out” related to the critique, according to excerpts from Libby’s 2004 grand jury testimony released late yesterday by Special Counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald.
Libby also told the grand jury that Cheney raised as an issue that the former ambassador’s wife worked at the CIA and that she allegedly played a role in sending him to investigate the Iraqi government’s interest in acquiring nuclear weapons materials. That issue formed the basis of former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV’s published critique.
In the court filing that included the formerly secret testimony, Fitzgerald did not assert that Cheney instructed Libby to tell reporters the name and role of [tag]Valerie Plame[/tag], Wilson’s wife. But he said Cheney’s interactions with Libby on that topic were a key part of the reason Libby allegedly made false statements to the FBI about his conversations with reporters around the time her name was disclosed in news accounts.
“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.
I’ve said it before; I’ll say it again — Dick Cheney is the single most destructive force in the Bush administration. Bush has made a series of remarkably, tragically bad decisions over the last six years, but right up there on the list is picking Cheney to run the VP search in 2000 — and letting him pick himself.