More War Lies

Patrick Fitzgerald has turned over a big rock, and lots of ugly Bush/Cheney creatures are scurrying to get out of the light. In particular, the testimony of White House insiders has made it clear that Bush and company were deliberately lying to the country when they denied knowlege or responsibility for the leak campaign. Did they also lie to Fitzgerald? If so, that's obstruction of justice, even if they were not under oath.

Peter Yost of the Associate Press lays out some incriminating details:

David Addington, chief legal adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney, says he was taken aback when the White House started making public pronouncements about the CIA leak investigation.


In the fall of 2003, President Bush's press secretary was categorically denying that either Karl Rove or I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby was involved in exposing the identity of Valerie Plame, a CIA employee married to a critic of the war in Iraq.

"Why are you making these statements?" Addington asked White House communications director Dan Bartlett.

"Your boss is the one who wanted" them, Bartlett replied, referring to Cheney.

With that, "I shut up," Addington recalled recently for jurors in Libby's CIA leak trial, which begins its fourth week on Monday with Libby's lawyers calling their first witnesses.

So far, the testimony of Addington and other administration aides, along with documents and Libby's audiotaped grand jury testimony, have provided a rare glimpse of how the Bush White House scrambled to respond to a political crisis as it intersected a criminal investigation.

At the intersection was Cheney, along with Rove and Libby, who were working in the summer of 2003 to rebut claims by Plame's husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, that Bush had misled the nation about prewar intelligence on Iraq.

The White House denials on behalf of Rove and Libby came just before Rove secretly began acknowledging to the FBI that he had confirmed Plame's identity for conservative columnist Bob Novak, who first published her name and relationship to Wilson...

This stuff, if not a smoking gun, is at least a couple of smoking holsters. I think we will soon be hearing the R word with respect to Cheney, and maybe the I word too - especially if the Libby Jury fails to believe Scooter's "I forgot" defense.

Via Huffpost.

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