Brain Age Test

Forum: Cheney's blurred memory shown with FBI interview

Thanks to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit and a cooperative judge, the 28-page summary of the FBI's 2004 interview with former Vice President Dick Cheney on the outing of CIA agent Valerie Plame Wilson finally has come to light. It shows him to have done the political imitation of a rope-a-doping Muhammad Ali.

In the interview by Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald, Cheney offered a barrage of denials and dodges of any effort to smear the woman's husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, who went to Niger to check on the Bush administration's claim that Iraq had sought uranium-yielding material for nuclear weapons.

The contention was the core of Bush's pitch to the United Nations for support of his planned invasion of Iraq in 2003, and later was proven to be fraudulent. After Wilson publicized his finding, his wife's identity as a CIA agent was reported by columnist Robert Novak, with others' fingers pointed at Cheney's chief of staff, Scooter Libby, as the leaker.

Fitzgerald set out on a quest to find the culprit, and although Novak later reported that his source was not Libby, but Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, Libby wound up getting indicted and convicted of lying and obstruction of justice. At the urging of Cheney, President George W. Bush commuted Libby's sentence but declined, despite Cheney's pleas, to pardon him.

Wilson engaged in a long fight with the Bush administration over what he claimed was a political vendetta against him through his wife, whose outing as a secret agent arguably was a federal offense.

But Cheney, the summary said, testified he was "unaware of anyone in the administration conducting any research or completing a research project on either Joe Wilson or his wife. He advised that he never directed anyone on his staff to conduct such a project, and no one advised him they were working on one."

According to the summary, Cheney also told Fitzgerald that "there was no discussion of 'pushing back' on Wilson's credibility by raising the nepotism issue, an

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