Cheney's notes add element to leak case

WASHINGTON -- The prosecutor in the CIA leak case said more than six months ago that he was not alleging any criminal acts by Vice President Dick Cheney regarding the leak of agency operative Valerie Plame's identity.

Today, the prosecutor is leaving the door open to the possibility that the vice president's now-indicted former chief of staff, I. Lewis Libby, was acting at his boss's behest when Libby allegedly leaked information about Plame to reporters.

A new court filing presents handwritten notes of Cheney's. Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald is using them to assert that the vice president and Libby were focusing much attention on Plame and her husband, former ambassador Joseph Wilson, a Bush administration critic.

Cheney's notes ask whether Plame had sent Wilson on a ''junket" to Africa. Subsequently, Plame's supposed role in her husband's trip to Africa allegedly was leaked to the media by both Libby and presidential adviser Karl Rove.

Cheney's notes on the margins of Wilson's column in The New York Times on July 6, 2003, reflect ''the contemporaneous reaction of the vice president," Fitzgerald said in the court filing Friday.

Wilson's column ''is relevant to establishing some of the facts that were viewed as important by the defendant's immediate superior, including whether Mr. Wilson's wife had 'sent him on a junket,' " the court papers say.

Cheney's notes ''support the proposition that publication of the Wilson op-ed acutely focused the attention of the vice president and the defendant -- his chief of staff -- on Mr. Wilson, on the assertions made in his article, and on responding to those assertions," according to the filing.

In the column, Wilson recounted how he had been sent by the CIA in 2002 to Niger to assess intelligence that Iraq had an agreement to acquire nuclear material known as uranium yellowcake from the African country. His conclusion: It was highly doubtful that such a deal existed.