WASHINGTON – Court documents released Friday provide new details about the testimony that Vice President Dick Cheney’s former chief of staff gave to a grand jury investigating his conversations with reporters and administration officials about a CIA operative.
The documents say Lewis “Scooter” Libby denied in his testimony ever mentioning CIA operative Valerie Plame to former White House press secretary Ari Fleischer or former New York Times reporter Judith Miller in separate conversations he had with them in July 2003, and further never disclosed talking to Miller about Plame in June 2003.
Libby was indicted in October on five counts of perjury, making false statements and obstruction of justice in the course of Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald’s investigation into the leak of Plame’s identity to the media. The indictment charges that Libby lied to investigators when he said he did not provide information about Plame to two reporters and when he said he learned about Plame from a third, NBC’s Tim Russert.
Libby has pleaded not guilty to the charges, and a judge on Friday set his trial for January 2007.
Miller testified last year that Libby first mentioned Plame to her in a conversation in late June 2003 when she visited his office in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, and they discussed Plame again on July 8 and July 12.
Fleischer testified that at a lunch with Libby in July 2003, Libby relayed to him “on the q.t.” that former ambassador Joseph Wilson’s wife worked at the CIA and sent Wilson on a fact-finding trip to Niger. Fleischer told the grand jury that he thought the lunch was “kinda weird” because Libby was normally “tight-lipped” and not so chummy that he would share such confidences with the press secretary.
The papers reveal that Libby said he never discussed Wilson’s wife with Fleischer.
Fitzgerald began investigating in early 2004 whether administration officials broke the law and leaked information about Plame as retaliation. Her name and CIA role appeared in a July 2003 syndicated column by Robert Novak – eight days after Wilson publicly criticized the Bush administration’s justification for waging war with Iraq.
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