Lewis Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, first learned about the CIA officer at the heart of the leak investigation in a conversation with Cheney weeks before her identity became public in 2003, lawyers involved in the case said on Monday.
Notes of the previously undisclosed conversation on June 12, 2003, appear to differ from Libby's testimony to a federal grand jury that he initially learned about the CIA officer, Valerie Wilson, from journalists, the lawyers said.
The notes, taken by Libby during the conversation, for the first time place Cheney in the middle of an effort by the White House to learn about Wilson's husband, Joseph Wilson, who was questioning the administration's handling of intelligence about Iraq's nuclear program used to justify the war.
Lawyers involved in the case said they showed Cheney knew that Wilson worked at the CIA more than a month before her undercover status was disclosed in a syndicated column by Robert Novak on July 14, 2003. Libby's notes indicate that Cheney got his information from then CIA director George Tenet in response to questions from the vice president about her husband.
But they contain no suggestion that either Cheney or Libby knew at the time of her undercover status.
Disclosing a covert agent's identity can be a crime, but only if the person who discloses it knows the agent's undercover status. However, any effort by Libby to steer investigators away from his conversation with Cheney could be considered by Patrick Fitzgerald, the special counsel, to be an illegal effort to impede the inquiry. Fitzgerald is expected to decide whether to bring charges in the case by Friday, when the grand jury term expires. Libby and Karl Rove, President George W. Bush's senior political adviser, both face the possibility of indictment.
Libby testified to the grand jury that he had first heard from journalists that Valerie Wilson may have had a role in dispatching her husband on a CIA-sponsored mission to Africa in 2002 in search of evidence that Iraq had acquired nuclear material there for its weapons program. But the notes, now in Fitzgerald's possession, also indicate that Libby first heard about Wilson from Cheney. That apparent discrepancy suggests why prosecutors are weighing false statement charges against him in what they interpret as an effort by Libby to protect Cheney from scrutiny.
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