This is the post I’ve been promising for weeks, in which I will speculate wildly as to the source of Cheney’s knowledge about Plame’s role at CPD and in her husband’s trip. Here’s the argument, in brief:
- Cheney learns during the week of June 9 that "Defense and State expressed a strong interestin the Niger intelligence"
- At a time when Cheney presumably already knew that information, he tried to get CIA to repeat it in such a way that it could be published
- This suggests he could not use his original source for that information (either because the source refused to publish that information or because he wanted to hide the source itself)
- One possible explanation (this is speculation, mind you) is that Cheney saw Valerie Wilson’s emails leading up to Wilson’s trip to Niger–which would have informed him of key information–and would have made it clear that Valerie’s identity was protected