Did Cheney Lie to the Plame Prosecutors?

Did Cheney Lie to the Plame Prosecutors?
By Scott Horton | Harper's

In the prosecution that led to the conviction of former Vice President Cheney’s chief of staff, Scooter Libby, Patrick Fitzgerald famously spoke of a “cloud over the vice president.” His remarks suggested that, while no charges had been pressed against Cheney, the vice president was considered an unindicted co-conspirator in a scheme to out covert CIA agent Valerie Plame. When, after a long struggle to protect Cheney from “embarrassment,” the Justice Department complied with a court order to disclose the FBI agents’ notes of the interview that Fitzgerald conducted with Cheney in 2004, the reason for these comments became clear. The cloud over Dick Cheney seems to be more of a fog bank engulfing him, however, and the fog is of Cheney’s making.

Cheney has been famous for decades for his steel-trap mind and near perfect recall. Yet in an interview that lasted only a couple of hours, Cheney competed with Alberto Gonzales for the selective amnesia prize. His memory failed him more than seventy times, on virtually every effort to probe anything of substance that had occurred within the prior year. Contemporaneous documents show that Cheney had been obsessing over these matters. Yet even when he was shown documents bearing his own handwritten comments, he had no recollection. His amnesia dovetailed perfectly with Scooter Libby’s forgetfulness on key points. Libby couldn’t recall having discussed Plame with Cheney, and Cheney couldn’t recall having discussed Plame with Libby. Their testimony seems well orchestrated, and the text of those “can’t recalls” is well designed to make a perjury prosecution difficult if the prosecutors should turn up solid proof to the contrary.

Nick Baumann has cobbled together a list of twenty-two major points on which Cheney’s memory suddenly went all fuzzy. A review shows just how programmatic that memory failure was. It covered anything that would have put the investigators on to Cheney’s role in the Plame outing. Read more.