Report: Cheney Authorized Libby to Leak CIA Report

Posted on Apr 14, 2006

Vice President Dick Cheney and his former chief of staff, Scooter Libby.

We know: “Duh!” right? Well, here’s what’s new: The author of this article, based on newly surfaced Libby testimony, all but accuses Cheney of outing Valerie Plame as a CIA agent—which has been widely suspected but never confirmed. The National Journal’s Murray Waas (the country’s leading news-breaker on this story) has the scoop.

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National Journal:

Cheney Authorized Leak Of CIA Report, Libby Says

By Murray Waas, National Journal
(c) National Journal Group Inc.
Friday, April 14, 2006

Vice President Dick Cheney directed his then-chief of staff, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, on July 12, 2003 to leak to the media portions of a then-highly classified CIA report that Cheney hoped would undermine the credibility of former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson, a critic of the Bush administration’s Iraq policy, according to Libby’s grand jury testimony in the CIA leak case and sources who have read the classified report.

The March 2002 intelligence report was a debriefing of Wilson by the CIA’s Directorate of Operations after Wilson returned from a CIA-sponsored mission to Niger to investigate claims, later proved to be unfounded, that Saddam Hussein had attempted to procure uranium from the African nation, according to government records.

The debriefing report made no mention of Wilson’s wife, Valerie Plame, then a covert CIA officer, or any role she may have played in her husband’s selection by the CIA to go to Niger, according to two people who have read the report.

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