Waas: Inside the Grand Jury

Here is excerpt article by Murray Waas. This CIA Leak investigation has been all along a White House conspiracy to silence former Ambassador, Joe Wilson..

By Murray Waas, National Journal

Libby also testified that when he told reporters that Plame was a CIA officer he had totally forgotten by then that that he might have been originally told that information by Cheney. Investigators are still attempting to determine whether he made the claim to protect Cheney.

In a further possible attempt to protect Cheney, Libby also testified to the grand jury that he did not believe he had discussed that Plame worked for the CIA with Cheney during the critical period that Libby was leaking such information to the press -- and didn't discuss it with the vice president until after syndicated columnist Robert Novak first disclosed on July 14 that Plame was a CIA "operative."

It would be significant that Cheney and Libby only discussed Plame's CIA employment after the July 14 Novak column because instead of discussing a highly classified secret, the information would then have been considered public information, and not illegal, because Novak had disclosed it in his column.

On March 5, 2004, special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald himself questioned Libby before the grand jury.
Asked by Fitzgerald if he recalled a conversation with Cheney during which they discussed Plame and that she sent her "husband on a junket," Libby replied:

"I don't recall the conversation until after the Novak piece. I don't recall it during the week of July 6. I recall it after the Novak…after the Novak article appeared..."

Fitzgerald then bore down on the witness: "And are you telling us under oath that from July 6th to July 14th you never discussed with Vice President Cheney whether Mr. Wilson's wife worked at the CIA?"

Libby replied: "No, no, I'm not saying that. On July 10 or 11 I learned, I thought anew, that the wife—that the reporters were telling us that the wife worked at the CIA. And I may have had a conversation with the Vice President either late on the 11th or on the 12th in which I relayed that reporters were saying that." As Libby further told it, if he discussed with Cheney that Plame was a CIA officer, he had only done so in the context of saying that the information was only an unsubstantiated rumor that he had heard from Tim Russert.

More on the story.

Here is my timeline of the leak case on Waterflake's website.