File this one away in the So? file:
May 13, 2006 – The role of Vice President Dick Cheney in the criminal case stemming from the outing of White House critic Joseph Wilson’s CIA wife is likely to get fresh attention as a result of newly disclosed notes showing that Cheney personally asked whether Wilson had been sent by his wife on a “junket” to Africa.
Cheney’s notes, written on the margins of a July 6, 2003 New York Times op-ed column by former ambassador Joseph Wilson, were included as part of a filing Friday night by prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald in the perjury and obstruction case against ex-Cheney chief of staff I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby.
The notes, Fitzgerald said in his filing, show that Cheney and Libby were “acutely focused” on the Wilson column and on rebutting his criticisms of the White House’s handling of pre-Iraq war intelligence. In the column, which created a firestorm after its publication, Wilson wrote that he had been dispatched by the CIA without pay to Niger in February, 2002 to investigate an intelligence report that Iraq was seeking uranium from the African country for a nuclear bomb. Wilson said he was told Cheney had asked about the intelligence,but the White House subsequently ignored his findings debunking the Niger claims.
In the margins of the op-ed, Cheney jotted out a series of questions that seemed to challenge many of Wilson’s assertions as well as the legitimacy of his CIA sponsored trip to Africa: “Have they done this sort of thing before? Send an Amb. [sic] 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?”
[…]But the notes provide significant new context to that assertion. They show the vice president personally raised questions about Wilson’s trip right after the publication of the Wilson column-and five days before Libby confirmed to Time reporter Matt Cooper that he had “heard” that Wilson’s wife, former CIA agent Valerie Plame, had played a role in sending him to Africa.
The MSM up to it’s old tricks again presenting a non-story as news. Of course the Administration was interested in Wilson’s allegations and how in the hell a former Ambassador ended up representing the CIA on a “fact-finding” mission. Is Newsweek saying it’s unusual for a Vice-President to ask a few questions every once in awhile?
Fitzgerald is desperate and it appears Newsweek wants to help him out anyway possible.
And check out this photo of Cheney they ran with:
It’s evvvviiiiilllllll Cheney!!!!
See author page
While waiting in a doctor’s office, I read Vanity Fair’s hatchet job on Cheney. It was a very strange artilce, because fact and opinion were completely unrelated. Whenever the author, who is married, I believe to a current or former Democratic operative, sticks to undisputed facts, Cheney comes across as intelligent, handworking, funny and down-to-earth. Then, based on nothing more than opinion, the article attacks Cheney as humorless, vindictive, and out-of-it. It’s the most schizophrenic thing I’ve ever seen. They really hate Cheney, but they do so based, not on facts, but on the persona they’ve built up around him in their own heads.