Investigative reporter Murray Waas has an exclusive: his reporting indicates that Vice President Dick Cheny has in effect admitted to the CIA and to the FBI that he was instrumental in revealing the identity of a CIA agent but not, the Veep insisted, on purpose.
Vice President Dick Cheney, according to a still-highly confidential FBI report, admitted to federal investigators that he rewrote talking points for the press in July 2003 that made it much more likely that the role of then-covert CIA-officer Valerie Plame in sending her husband on a CIA-sponsored mission to Africa would come to light.
Cheney conceded during his interview with federal investigators that in drawing attention to Plame’s role in arranging her husband’s Africa trip reporters might also unmask her role as CIA officer.
Cheney denied to the investigators, however, that he had done anything on purpose that would lead to the outing of Plame as a covert CIA operative. But the investigators came away from their interview with Cheney believing that he had not given them a plausible explanation as to how he could focus attention on Plame’s role in arranging her husband’s trip without her CIA status also possibly publicly exposed. At the time, Plame was a covert CIA officer involved in preventing Iran from obtaining weapons of mass destruction, and Cheney’s office played a central role in exposing her and nullifying much of her work.
Cheney has his defenders, but it’s pretty clear that he will join George W. Bush as being part of what historians will not consider one of the United States’ most illustrious Presidential-Vice Presidential teams. Place your bets now in Vegas that by 2015 they will be considered among the worst two people to have held their offices — not because historians will be ideological hacks, but because of their job performances and concept of the law and good old-fashioned personal ethics.
He has already greatly impressed the American people: a recent poll found that 23 percent feel Cheney is the worst U.S. Vice President in history, with 41 percent feeling Cheney is a poor vice president, and only 34 percent rating him a good number two. Cheney had to work hard to get such notable numbers…
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.