US Vice President Dick Cheney made handwritten notations on a July 2003 newspaper column that indicate he was focused on a critic of the administration's Iraq policy, according to a court filing in the CIA leak case.
Cheney's notes were cited in a prosecution brief in the case against the vice president's former chief of staff, Lewis Libby Jr. The entries were made on a copy of an opinion column by Joseph Wilson, a former ambassador, that was published in the New York Times on July 6, 2003.
"Those annotations support the proposition that publication of the Wilson Op-Ed acutely focused the attention of the vice president and the defendant -- his chief of staff -- on Wilson, on the assertions made in his article, and on responding to those assertions," said the legal papers filed on Friday by Patrick Fitzgerald, special counsel in the case.
In neat writing above the text of the column, prosecutors say, Cheney wrote: "Have they done this sort of thing before? Send an Amb. to assess a question? Do we normally send people out pro bono to work for us? Or did his wife send him on a junket?"
In the column, Wilson wrote about his doubts about administration assertions that Iraq had tried to acquire nuclear fuel from Africa. Wilson said that his skepticism was based on a trip to Niger in early 2002 to examine intelligence reports that Iraq was trying to purchase uranium ore.
Wilson is the husband of Valerie Plame, the CIA officer at the center of the leak case. Cheney's notes confirm he was aware of who she was, if not her name, before her name was first publicly disclosed in a July 14, 2003 column by Robert Novak.
The prosecution brief said: "The annotated version of the article reflects the contemporaneous reaction of the vice president to Mr Wilson's Op-Ed article, and thus is relevant to establishing some of the facts that were viewed as important by the defendant's immediate superior, including whether Mr Wilson's wife had `sen[t] him on a junket.'"
The notes add new detail to what is already known about Cheney's interest in rebutting the assertions in Wilson's column. The notes suggest his questions may have lent urgency to the issue of whether Valerie Plame had sent her husband to Africa as a junket.
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