Why do I have to go to a wingnut publication to get this story? Regardless, the Plame Affair finally looks to be
going somewhere:
Federal law-enforcement officials said that they have developed hard evidence of possible criminal misconduct by two employees of Vice President Dick Cheney's office related to the unlawful exposure of a CIA officer's identity last year. The investigation, which is continuing, could lead to indictments, a Justice Department official said.
According to these sources, John Hannah and Cheney's chief of staff, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, were the two Cheney employees. "We believe that Hannah was the major player in this," one federal law-enforcement officer said. Calls to the vice president's office were not returned, nor did Hannah and Libby return calls.
The strategy of the FBI is to make clear to Hannah "that he faces a real possibility of doing jail time" as a way to pressure him to name superiors, one federal law-enforcement official said.
Does anything Cheney touch not end up investigated?
Hannah, by the way, is a "senior national security aide" for Cheney, and was, in fact, the administration's main point of contact with Chalabi's INC.
A memo written by a top Washington lobbyist for the controversial Iraqi National Congress raises new questions about the role Vice President Dick Cheney's office played in the run-up to the war in Iraq.
The memo, obtained by NEWSWEEK, suggests that the INC last year was directly feeding intelligence reports about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and purported ties to terrorism to one of Cheney's top foreign- policy aides. Cheney staffers later pushed INC info--including defectors' claims about WMD and terror ties--to bolster the case that Saddam's government posed a direct threat to America. But the CIA and other U.S. intelligence agencies have strongly questioned the reliability of defectors supplied by the INC. [...]
But a June 2002 memo written by INC lobbyist Entifadh Qunbar to a U.S. Senate committee lists John Hannah, a senior national-security aide on Cheney's staff, as one of two "U.S. governmental recipients" for reports generated by an intelligence program being run by the INC and which was then being funded by the State Department. Under the program, "defectors, reports and raw intelligence are cultivated and analyzed"; the info was then reported to, among others, "appropriate governmental, non-governmental and international agencies." The memo not only describes Cheney aide Hannah as a "principal point of contact" for the program, it even provides his direct White House telephone number.
So Hannah better get himself a good lawyer. Not only will he need to save his skin on the Plame Affair, but also when his role in falsifying the pre-war intelligence becomes clearer.