Though not charged, Cheney at center of trial

Ex-Cheney aide fills in the picture
Testimony from Cheney’s former communications director, Cathie Martin, also painted a picture of the vice president as having been deeply involved in efforts to repudiate Wilson’s claim from the beginning. Martin testified that even before Wilson wrote his op-ed, Cheney’s office was seeking information from the CIA about his mission to Africa.

Once Wilson’s column appeared, in July 2003, the vice president’s office went into crisis mode, Martin testified, saying Cheney had her deliver transcripts of news reports about the case to him personally.

Martin testified that Cheney personally dictated a list of “talking points” outlining how Ari Fleischer, then the White House press secretary, should rebut Wilson’s report; on another occasion, she said, Cheney wrote out on a note card what Libby should say when he was contacted by a reporter.

And then there was this note, scrawled in Cheney’s own handwriting: “Not going to protect one staffer + sacrifice the guy that was asked to stick his neck in the meat grinder because of the incompetence of others.” Prosecutors contended that this established Cheney’s determination to protect Libby, and thus his office, from being made a scapegoat for the White House and senior adviser Karl Rove.

In essence, according to the prosecution case, Libby was just the curtain. Cheney was the man behind the curtain.

“Everything ends up at Dick Cheney’s desk,” Jonathan Turley, a constitutional law specialist at George Washington University, said in an interview with MSNBC-TV. “His right-hand man is indicted; he’s intimately involved in the Niger allegation with weapons of mass destruction; he’s the one that seems to have instructed Libby.

“The biggest question is not whether he will be called as a witness but why he wasn’t a co-conspirator,” Turley added.

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