Cheney's Suspected Role in Security Breach Drove Fitzgerald


By R. Jeffrey Smith
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, March 7, 2007; Page A06

In a small room on the third floor of the D.C. federal courthouse in late March 2004, Special Counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald stood before I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby and asked him three separate times whether his boss, Vice President Cheney, had discussed telling reporters that Valerie Plame worked for the CIA.

The question was not insignificant for Fitzgerald, who saw his mission as revealing the full chain of events behind the security breach involving Plame's work as an undercover CIA officer. Fitzgerald was unconvinced by Libby's response that even though he "may have" had such a conversation with Cheney, it probably occurred after Plame's identity had been revealed in a newspaper column.

Fitzgerald would respond with great frustration in his summation at Libby's trial almost three years later, saying that Libby's lies had effectively prevented him from learning about all of Cheney's actions in the administration's campaign to undermine Plame's husband, Joseph C. Wilson IV, a critic of the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

More than he had previously, Fitzgerald made clear in those remarks that his search for the truth about Cheney was a key ambition in his probe and that his inability to get it was a key provocation for Libby's indictment. Although Cheney was the target, Fitzgerald's investigation could not reach him because of Libby's duplicity...

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