page_title: Plame affair grand jury investigation
section_title: Court proceedings
hierarchical_section_title: Plame affair grand jury investigation / United States v. Libby / Court proceedings
caption_attribution_description: English: This document was contained within a filing by Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald on May 12, 2006. Cheney's notes at the top read: Have they done this sort of thing before? Send an Amb[assador] to answer a question? Do we ordinarily send people out pro bono to work for us? Or did his wife send him on a junket? Source http://www.usdoj.gov/usao/iln/osc/exhibits/0214/index.html, though copyright held by The New York Times since it is a scanning of their newspaper Licensing The focus of the image is handwritten comments made by the Vice President of the United States in the course of his duties. Incidental to this are de minimis inclusions of portions of a page from the New York Times, that likely do not rise to the level necessary to attract copyright.
context_page_description: The CIA leak grand jury investigation was a federal inquiry "into the alleged unauthorized disclosure of a Central Intelligence Agency employee's identity", a possible violation of criminal statutes, including the Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982, and Title 18, United States Code, Section 793.
context_section_description: Due to the huge amount of classified material that had been requested by Libby's defense, David Corn speculated that Libby was using Graymail as defense tactic. Libby had added the graymail expert John D. Cline to his defense team.
  In December 2005, Patrick Fitzgerald responded to a motion by Dow Jones & Company, Inc., to unseal all or part of the redacted portion of a United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia opinion issued on February 15, 2005. The opinion pertained to oral arguments held on December 8, 2004. The opinion of the court was released on February 3, 2006, to the public.  It states:
  As to the leaks' harmfulness, although the record omits specifics about Plame's work, it appears to confirm, as alleged in the public record and reported in the press, that she worked for the CIA in some unusual capacity relating to counterproliferation. Addressing deficiencies of proof regarding the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, the special counsel refers to Plame as "a person whose identity the CIA was making specific efforts to conceal and who had carried out covert work overseas within the last 5 years" — representations I trust the special counsel would not make without support. (8/27/04 Aff. at 28 n.15.)
  On January 31, 2006, letters exchanged between Libby's lawyers and Fitzgerald's office concerning matters of discovery were released to the public. Reportedly, Fitzgerald states:
  A formal assessment has not been done of the damage caused by the disclosure of Valerie Wilson's status as a CIA employee, and thus we possess no such document. In any event, we would not view an assessment of the damage caused by the disclosure as relevant to the issue of whether or not Mr. Libby intentionally lied when he made the statements and gave the grand jury testimony which the grand jury alleged was false.
  On March 17, 2006, Patrick Fitzgerald filed the government's response to a motion by Scooter Libby's defense team to dismiss the indictments.
  On April 5, 2006, Patrick Fitzgerald filed the government's response to a motion by Scooter Libby's defense team on issues of discovery. On April 12, 2006, Fitzgerald issued a correction to some of the information in the government's motion. In the memo, he writes:
  Nor would such documents of the CIA, NSC and the State Department place in context the importance of the conversations in which defendant participated. Defendant's participation in a critical conversation with Judith Miller on July 8 (discussed further below) occurred only after the Vice President advised defendant that the President specifically had authorized defendant to disclose certain information in the NIE. 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. Defendant further testified that on July 12, 2003, he was specifically directed by the Vice President to speak to the press in place of Cathie Martin (then the communications person for the Vice President) regarding the NIE and Wilson. Defendant was instructed to provide what was for him an extremely rare "on the record" statement, and to provide "background" and "deep background" statements, and to provide information contained in a document defendant understood to be the cable authored by Mr. Wilson. During the conversations that followed on July 12, defendant discussed Ms. Wilson's employment with both Matthew Cooper (for the first time) and Judith Miller (for the third time). Even if someone else in some other agency thought that the controversy about Mr. Wilson and/or his wife was a trifle, that person's state of mind would be irrelevant to the importance and focus defendant placed on the matter and the importance he attached to the surrounding conversations he was directed to engage in by the Vice President.
  Karl Rove testified before the new grand jury for the fifth time in the case on April 26, 2006, and, on June 12, 2006, his attorney stated th
caption: A handwritten note above Joe Wilson's editorial by Vice President Dick Cheney. Cheney wrote: "Have they done this sort of thing before?" "Send an amb(assador) to answer a question?" "Do we ordinarily send people out pro bono to work for us? "Or did his wife send him on a junket?".
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