Cheney advisor charged with felony

I Lewis Libby Jr., Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff and one of the most powerful figures in the Bush administration, was for...

I Lewis Libby Jr., Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff and one of the most powerful figures in the Bush administration, was formally accused on Friday of lying and obstruction of justice during an inquiry into the unmasking of a covert CIA officer.

A grand jury indicted Libby on one count of obstruction, two of perjury and two of making false statements in the course of an investigation that raised questions about the administration’s rationale for going to war against Iraq, how it treats critics and political opponents and whether high White House officials shaded the truth.

Libby’s resignation was announced almost immediately afterwards. The charges are felonies and could bring a sentence of up to five years in prison and a hefty fine.

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Karl Rove, President George W. Bush’s senior adviser and deputy chief of staff, was not charged, but will remain under investigation, people briefed officially about the case said. As a result, they said, the special counsel in the case, Patrick J. Fitzgerald, was likely to extend the term of the federal grand jury beyond its scheduled expiration today.

The indictment constitutes a body blow to the White House, which has faced political problems on several fronts of late and where Rove and Libby have been powerful presences—Rove as the president’s alter ego and top political adviser, and Libby as an important adviser to one of the most powerful vice presidents in American history.

If the charges announced today lead to a conviction or guilty plea, the episode will stand in Washington history as another example of a cover-up becoming more serious than the original wrongdoing.

Libby’s indictment is the latest chapter in an episode that at first seemed like a tempest in a political teapot, driven by spite and revolving around the issue of whether anyone had violated an obscure federal statute that makes it illegal, under some circumstances, to unmask an undercover agent.

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Questions about the extent of Libby’s involvement in the affair intensified this week, when lawyers said that he first learned about Plame from Cheney on June 12, 2003, rather than from journalists several weeks after that date. Plame’s husband, Joseph C. Wilson IV, is a former diplomat who was highly critical of the Bush administration’s case for going to war.

On July 6, 2003, Wilson wrote an Op-Ed article in The New York Times recounting a trip to Niger at the behest of the CIA that left him highly skeptical of Bush administration assertions about Iraq’s quest for nuclear material to make weapons.

Eight days later, columnist Robert Novak disclosed that Wilson’s wife was a CIA operative working on the issue of weapons of mass destruction, and that she had recommended her husband for the trip to Africa in 2002 to look into intelligence reports that Iraq had sought uranium from Niger. Novak wrote that he had learned of Plame’s identity from two senior administration officials. —NYT