"Scooter" Libby Spoke with Reporters about Plame, Too
From the Financial Times:
US Vice-President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, Lewis I. "Scooter" Libby, spoke to a Time magazine reporter prior to the leaking of the name of a covert CIA agent, the reporter has told a grand jury investigating the issue.No big surprise. Scooter, Dick Cheney's senior dick, is said to have been "completely and utterly obsessed with Joe Wilson" after Wilson came back to report the yellow cake documents were a lie.
Matt Cooper, who escaped a jail sentence when he agreed to testify in the case, told the jury that he spoke to Mr Libby as well as to Karl Rove, the deputy White House chief of staff and the top political adviser to US President George W. Bush.
The testimony places a second top Bush official at the centre of a politically charged investigation into whether anyone in the administration broke US laws in an effort to undermine a high-profile critic of the Iraq war.
In an account of his testimony published yesterday, Mr Cooper said that neither Mr Libby nor Mr Rove revealed the name of the agent, nor did they mention her covert status. But the White House had previously denied that either man spoke to reporters about the issue. Mr Cooper also told NBC News yesterday that there might have been other sources as well for the stories.
Like Rove, Scooter is purportedly one of the three men Scott McClellan personally asked back in 2003 if they had had this "outing" conversation with the press and, also like Rove, Scooter claimed he had not. And then Scott - who won't of course pre-judge or comment on an ongoing investigation - assured the American public through the WH press corps that these men do not lie.
::cough::
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