1 Boring Old Man

John Dean: Cheney may have given false statements to FBI
the Raw Story
By David Edwards and Daniel Tencer
November 3rd, 2009

There is "a lot of evidence" that Vice President Dick Cheney gave false statements to the FBI during its investigation of the Valerie Plame leak affair, says former White House attorney John Dean. Dean told MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann that Cheney attained "something of a record" by refusing to answer or claiming to not recall the answer to 72 questions posed by the FBI during a May, 2004, interview. "If you’ll recall, former Chief of Staff Bob Haldeman did 150 ‘I don’t recalls’ during his three days before the Senate Watergate committee," Dean said. "This is 72 in less than three hours, that’s right up there." The comparison is striking, because Haldeman served 18 months in prison for conspiracy and obstruction of justice in the Watergate scandal.

"There’s a lot of evidence that [Cheney] gave a number of false statements to federal officials, which is clearly a federal offense under 18 U.S.C. § 1001, and it could well be obstruction of justice," Dean said on MSNBC’s Countdown Monday night. Dean added that "it’s not clear why Fitzgerald did not aggressively pursue this," referring to US Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald, who prosecuted the Plame leak case… "It clearly shows in this testimony, as well as in all his other actions, that Libby fell on his sword for his boss," Dean told Olbermann. "His boss obviously felt an obligation and wanted to maintain that relationship of confidentiality." Dean said that Cheney is safe from prosecution, because "he has now gotten himself beyond the statute of limitations"…

I think my closer to glad was left over from my magnum opus post [Cooper’s Conundrum…] yesterday. It makes it easier for people who really know what happened to talk. They don’t have to be so anonymous. They don’t have to worry about being subpoenaed. They can just say what they know into the ether of public opinion and let us work it out ourselves. If I were one of those high ranking State Department Officials or retired C.I.A. operatives, I’d feel a lot more comfortable telling what I know without the prospect of a high profile court case. And then there are always Congressional Hearings.

I’ve reread the interview release enough times now to be used to it. I don’t stop in the middle anymore and go make coffee, or go in the other room and wonder why I’m there. A lot of the looking up for that long post down there was a way of avoiding reading the interview. I still have to remind myself that this man, Dick Cheney, former Vice President, is more than a politician who paints himself in the best light. He’s an actual practiced prevaricator extraordinaire. While emptywheel has the best notion of a boldfaced lie [meeting Judith Miller in Wyoming], lies are scattered everywhere, including the 72 "don’t recalls." But the real lie is in the space between the words – Joseph Wilson was an "irritant." Wilson’s trip was "’amateur hour’ at the C.I.A." – not up to "trade-craft" standards – "lacked detail." Speaking of detail, he could not decipher his own handwriting. The crossed out part might say "the pres," – he couldn’t be sure, "but, in any event, it had been crossed out."