Plame Gossip - Right to the edge on Cheney

Again, this is from court filings so I don't have the full context at this point, but check out this revelation, "Libby Told Grand Jury Cheney Spoke of Plame." This isn't a huge surprise after the Wilson Op/Ed with Cheney's handwritten notes, but it is still more confirmation of what we all suspected, that Vice President Dick Cheney was chest deep in the effort to rebut Wilson and was discussing Plame with Scooter Libby.

"The state of mind of the Vice President as communicated to defendant(Libby) is directly relevant to the issue of whether defendant knowingly made false statements to federal agents and the grand jury regarding when and how he learned about Ms. Wilson's employment and what he said to reporters regarding this issue," he said.

Also from an updated AP story,

In his grand jury testimony, Libby said Cheney was so upset about Wilson's allegations that they discussed them daily after the article appeared. "He was very keen to get the truth out," Libby testified, quoting Cheney as saying, "Let's get everything out."

So, Cheney was talking about Wilson's "allegations" daily in the wake of the Wilson editorial but before Plame was outed. We have circumstantial evidence that Libby, and maybe Cheney, were directly warned by a high ranking CIA agent about outing Plame, possibly by more than one person, before Plame was outed.

Fitzgerald has repeatedly stated in filings that he believes Plame's status was classified, and because Libby knew this, was motivated to commit perjury. Now, if Cheney and Libby were having "daily conversations" about Wilson, and Cheney had hand written notes mentioning Wilson's wife.......

The timing is key. We don't yet have the exact timing.

But, to me, it is beginning to look alot more like Fitzgerald is indeed looking at the underlying crime, the outing of Valerie Plame, and, from the paltry bits that have been released by Fitzgerald, it does appear that this outing came very close to these conversations between Cheney and Libby.

In this scenario, this phase of the investigation, Rove/Libby perjury/obstruction, is merely clearing the evidentiary field before Fitzgerald proceeds to investigate and prosecute the underlying crime of outing a covert agent. That's my current working theory of the investigation.

We'll have to wait and see on all this, of course, but with every revelation in this area, Cheney's strained heart is beating just a little faster.