This is from Sunday, April 9, 2006:
A “Concerted Effort” to Discredit Bush Critic
Prosecutor describes Cheney, Libby as key voices pitching Iraq-Niger story.
By Barton Gellman and Dafna Linzer for The Washington Post
As he drew back the curtain this week on the evidence against Vice President Cheney’s former top aide, Special Counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald for the first time described a “concerted action” by “multiple people in the White House” – using classified information – to “discredit, punish or seek revenge against” a critic of President Bush’s war in Iraq.
Bluntly and repeatedly, Fitzgerald placed Cheney at the center of that campaign. Citing grand jury testimony from the vice president’s former chief of staff, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, Fitzgerald fingered Cheney as the first to voice a line of attack that at least three White House officials would soon deploy against former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV.
Cheney, in a conversation with Libby in early July 2003, was said to describe Wilson’s CIA-sponsored trip to Niger the previous year – in which the envoy found no support for charges that Iraq tried to buy uranium there – as “a junket set up by Mr. Wilson’s wife,” CIA case officer Valerie Plame.
Libby is charged with perjury and obstruction of justice for denying under oath that he disclosed Plame’s CIA employment to journalists. There is no public evidence to suggest Libby made any such disclosure with Cheney’s knowledge. But according to Libby’s grand jury testimony, described for the first time in legal papers filed this week, Cheney “specifically directed” Libby in late June or early July 2003 to pass information to reporters from two classified CIA documents: an October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate and a March 2002 summary of Wilson’s visit to Niger.
One striking feature of that decision