By PETE YOST, Associated Press Writer 3 minutes ago
http://news.yahoo.com/;_ylt=AnhR8oMy...NlYwMlJVRPUCUl
WASHINGTON - Vice President Dick Cheney's former top aide told
prosecutors President Bush authorized the leak of sensitive
intelligence information about Iraq, according to court papers filed by
prosecutors in the CIA leak case.
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Before his indictment, I. Lewis Libby testified to the grand jury
investigating the CIA leak that Cheney told him to pass on information
and that it was Bush who authorized the disclosure, the court papers
say. According to the documents, the authorization led to the July 8,
2003, conversation between Libby and New York Times reporter Judith
Miller.
There was no indication in the filing that either Bush or Cheney
authorized Libby to disclose Valerie Plame's CIA identity.
But the disclosure in documents filed Wednesday means that the
president and the vice president put Libby in play as a secret provider
of information to reporters about prewar intelligence on Iraq.
The authorization came as the Bush administration faced mounting
criticism about its failure to find weapons of mass destruction in
Iraq, the main reason the president and his aides had given for going
to war.
Libby's participation in a critical conversation with Miller on July 8,
2003 "occurred only after the vice president advised defendant that the
president specifically had authorized defendant to disclose certain
information in the National Intelligence Estimate," the papers by
Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald stated. The filing did not specify
the "certain information."
"Defendant testified that the circumstances of his conversation with
reporter Miller ? getting approval from the president through the vice
president to discuss material that would be classified but for that
approval ? were unique in his recollection," the papers added.
Libby is asking for voluminous amounts of classified information from
the government in order to defend himself against five counts of
perjury, obstruction and lying to the FBI in the Plame affair.
He is accused of making false statements about how he learned of
Plame's CIA employment and what he told reporters about it.
Her CIA status was publicly disclosed eight days after her husband,
former U.S. Ambassador Joseph Wilson, accused the Bush administration
of twisting prewar intelligence to exaggerate the Iraqi threat from
weapons of mass destruction.
In 2002, Wilson had been dispatched to Africa by the CIA to check out
intelligence that Iraq had an agreement to acquire uranium yellowcake
from Niger, and Wilson had concluded that there was no such
arrangement.
Libby says he needs extensive classified files from the government to
demonstrate that Plame's CIA connection was a peripheral matter that he
never focused on, and that the role of Wilson's wife was a small piece
in a building public controversy over the failure to find WMD in Iraq.
Fitzgerald said in the new court filing that Libby's requests for
information go too far and the prosecutor cited Libby's own statements
to investigators in an attempt to limit the amount of information the
government must turn over to Cheney's former chief of staff for his
criminal defense.
According to Miller's grand jury testimony, Libby told her about
Plame's CIA status in the July 8, 2003 conversation that took place
shortly after the White House aide ? according to the new court filing
? was authorized by Bush through Cheney to disclose sensitive
intelligence about Iraq and WMD contained in a National Intelligence
Estimate.
The court filing was first disclosed by The New York Sun.