This is the second post in a series. In the prior post, I showed that, when Libby asked David Addington about paperwork relating to a CIA employee’s spouse traveling for the CIA, he was interested in identifying all backup documents to Wilson’s 2002 trip and/or the paperwork associated with Wilson’s 1999 trip to Niger relating to AQ Khan. In this post, I’ll show that, the two questions Libby asked Addington reflect the annotations Cheney wrote on Wilson’s op-ed.
As best as we can tell, on late July 6 or early July 7, 2003, DickCheney returned to DC from a long weekend in Jackson Hole. He broughtwith him his copy of Joe Wilson’s op-ed, folded vertically. In addition to a bunch of underlines Cheney had made, he had written at the top:
Have they done this sort of thing?
Send an Amb to answer a question?
Do we ordinarily send people out pro bono to work for us?
Or did his wife send him on a junket?
I have shownthat Cheney clearly read (and presumably annotated) this op-ed beforeJuly 8.That’s because the talking points he dictates to Cathie Martinon July 8 refer explicitly to what Wilson says in his op-ed.
But the important point about these talking points is that Cheney references Wilson’s op-ed. Ashard as Libby tries, he cannot claim that Cheney only read Wilson’sop-ed after the Novak article. Cheney uses an attack–the ridiculousattack about Wilson going pro bono–that he wrote in his op-ed talkingpoints in the talking points he dictated to Martin on July 8.
If you’ve got a strong heart, Fitzgerald does a much (much!) weedier version of this in his closing argument,showing that many of Cheney’s underlines and notes show up in thesetalking points. Both Fitzgerald’s and my version make it crystal clear thatCheney’s changed his instructions to Cathie Martin–and OVP’s standard talking points addressing Joe Wilson–in response to reading Wilson’s op-ed.
But what about Libby? Did Cheney change his instructions for Libby after annotating Wilson’s op-ed? If we can prove he was, it adds one more piece ofevidence to the accumulating collection of evidence showing that Cheneyordered Libby to leak Plame’s identity.