Ash and Leopold:Cheney's Handwritten Notes Implicate Bush in Plame Affair

Bingo!!

Copies of handwritten notes by Vice President Dick Cheney, introduced at trial by defense attorneys for former White House staffer I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, would appear to implicate George W. Bush in the Plame CIA Leak case.

Bush has long maintained that he was unaware of attacks by any member of his administration against [former ambassador Joseph] Wilson. The ex-envoy's stinging rebukes of the administration's use of pre-war Iraq intelligence led Libby and other White House officials to leak Wilson's wife's covert CIA status to reporters in July 2003 in an act of retaliation.

But Cheney's notes, which were introduced into evidence Tuesday during Libby's perjury and obstruction-of-justice trial, call into question the truthfulness of President Bush's vehement denials about his prior knowledge of the attacks against Wilson. The revelation that Bush may have known all along that there was an effort by members of his office to discredit the former ambassador begs the question: Was the president also aware that senior members of his administration compromised Valerie Plame's undercover role with the CIA?

Further, the highly explicit nature of Cheney's comments not only hints at a rift between Cheney and Bush over what Cheney felt was the scapegoating of Libby, but also raises serious questions about potentially criminal actions by Bush. If Bush did indeed play an active role in encouraging Libby to take the fall to protect Karl Rove, as Libby's lawyers articulated in their opening statements, then that could be viewed as criminal involvement by Bush.

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/013107Z.shtml

***Interesting news from blogger Emptywheel:

This became most clear when Fitzgerald started talking about the document on which Cheney mentioned Bush (then crossed it out). Fitzgerald's point was that OVP had stamped a classification that is not really a classification on these documents--Treated as Top Secret/SCI--that is, as Addington explained, not really a classification, "treated as." Pretty damning stuff, catching Cheney and Libby protecting their own deliberations by classifying the hell out of them, inventing new classifications.