A newly released transcript of a 2004 FBI interview of former Vice President Dick Cheney shows that he — according to his own words, anyway — had only fuzzy memories of a major incident that was then less than a year old.
The transcript is replete with Cheney saying he “could not recall,” “could not specifically remember” or “has no recollection.”
Cheney was interviewed by FBI agents attempting to discover the source of the leak that outed Valerie Plame as a CIA agent. She is the wife of Joseph Wilson, a former ambassador who was assigned in 2002 by the CIA to investigate foreign intelligence reports that Saddam Hussein had tried to buy nuclear weapons materials from the African country of Niger.
During his 2003 State of the Union speech, two months before he ordered the invasion of Iraq, then-President George W. Bush reiterated the gist of the foreign reports.
Wilson wrote a column for The New York Times stating that after he returned from the Niger mission, he had reported there was no evidence substantiating the reports. Subsequently, Valerie Plame’s position as a covert CIA agent surfaced in a newspaper. Was this a leak from a high-level government office to get back at Wilson?
An investigation by federal prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald zeroed in on Cheney’s office. Chief of Staff I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby went to trial and, while not shedding light on the leak, did testify that he told Cheney he had made a note saying he had first heard about Plame’s CIA identity from him.
That led Fitzgerald to declare: “There is a cloud over the vice president.”
True to form, however, Cheney, the transcript shows, said he had “no specific recollection of such a conversation” with Libby, who in 2007 was convicted of obstructing justice but later had his prison sentence commuted by President Bush.
Cheney’s multiple references to his faulty memory make Fitzgerald’s “cloud” comment even more memorable — and damning.
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