Cheney to testify in Libbygate

[Mark Gobell]

Cheney to Be Defense Witness in C.I.A. Leak Case

By DAVID JOHNSTON
Published: December 19, 2006

WASHINGTON, Dec. 19 – Vice President Dick Cheney will be summoned as a defense witness in the perjury and obstruction of justice trial of his former chief of staff, I. Lewis Libby Jr., which is scheduled to begin next month, a defense lawyer said today.

The decision was announced at a hearing in federal district court by Theodore Wells, a lawyer for Mr. Libby. “We’re calling the Vice President,” Mr. Wells said.

Mr. Cheney has been a looming presence in the C.I.A. leak case from the start. His appearance as a defense witness would keep the vice president and the White House in the foreground of Mr. Libby’s criminal trial. It would expose him to cross examination, and could raise questions about precedents for a sitting vice president to appear at a criminal trial while in office.

After the hearing, a vice presidential spokeswoman, Lee Anne McBride, said Mr. Cheney would not resist the request for his testimony. “We’ve cooperated fully in this matter and will continue to do so in fairness to the parties involved. And as we’ve stated previously we’re not going to comment further on the legal proceedings.”

The lawyers gave no indication at the hearing about the testimony they would seek to elicit from Mr. Cheney, but evidence in the case suggests that Mr. Cheney played a central role in events that led to the leak investigation.

Mr. Wells disclosed the plan to call Mr. Cheney after the special prosecutor in the case, Patrick J. Fitzgerald, told United States District Judge Reggie B. Walton that prosecutors had no plans to call the vice president as a witness – after they had said in legal papers that they might call him.

With the trial scheduled to start on Jan. 16, Mr. Libby’s lawyers and federal prosecutors skirmished throughout the hearing over several issues likely to surface about Mr. Libby’s motives and state of mind.

But it was the likelihood of Mr. Cheney’s testimony that suggested that a narrow perjury trial could be transformed into a riveting courtroom drama with the taciturn Mr. Cheney as the star witness.

Citing Mr. Libby’s grand jury testimony, prosecutors have said in legal filings that Mr. Cheney was ”upset” by an Op-Ed article in The New York Times on July 6, 2003, written by Joseph C. Wilson IV, a former ambassador, according to the papers filed in Federal District Court in the District of Columbia.

The article criticized the Bush administration Iraq policy. Mr. Wilson expressed serious doubts about assertions in the months before the war that Iraq had sought uranium fuel from Africa as part of a suspected program to develop unconventional weapons.

Mr. Cheney, according to Mr. Libby’s grand jury testimony, believed that the article falsely attacked his credibility because it said the vice president’s office instigated a trip in 2002 that Mr. Wilson took to Niger to explore reports of Iraq’s possible nuclear fuel purchases.

Prosecutors have already disclosed a copy of the article on which Mr. Cheney made handwritten notations asking whether it was Mr. Wilson’s wife who sent him on the trip. Mr. Wilson is married to Valerie Plame Wilson, the C.I.A. officer whose name was disclosed in a syndicated column on July 14, 2003. The column by Robert D. Novak led to the inquiry that ended with the indictment against Mr. Libby in October 2005.

In previous legal briefs, prosecutors have said they want to use Mr. Cheney’s notes as evidence, saying they show the agitated environment in Mr. Cheney’s office and the importance that Mr. Libby attached to the effort to rebut the article.

After Mr. Cheney expressed concern, Mr. Libby told several reporters that Mr. Cheney’s office did not send Mr. Wilson and that he might have traveled on what was little more than a junket arranged by Ms. Wilson.

The indictment against Mr. Libby said that he falsely told F.B.I. agents and later a grand jury that it was the reporters who told him about Ms. Wilson’s employment at the C.I.A. and that she may have had a role in sending him to Niger.

William Jeffress, one of Mr. Libby’s lawyers, said that he planned to call Mr. Libby as witness, along with several reporters who interviewed Mr. Libby in mid-2003 to show that Mr. Libby had encouraged the reporters to testify and give depositions in the case.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/19/washington/19cnd-leak.html?hp&ex=116 6590800&en=971a8c71a4f0b029&ei=5094&partner=homepage