PLAME/FITZGERALD UPDATE….In the spirit of getting things right ? and avoiding future embarrassment ? it turns out that Patrick Fitzgerald has filed an update to his now-famous court filing from last week. In the original filing he said:
[Libby] understood that he was to tell Miller, among other things, that a key judgment of the NIE held that Iraq was “vigorously trying to procure” uranium.
In other words, Dick Cheney had instructed Libby to lie, since the “vigorously trying to procure” statement wasn’t one of the key judgments of the NIE. But now Fitzgerald has amended his filing to state the following:
[Libby] understood that he was to tell Miller, among other things, some of the key judgments of the NIE, and that the NIE stated that Iraq was “vigorously trying to procure” uranium.
This doesn’t really have much impact on the main revelation of Fitzgerald’s filing ? namely that Cheney and Bush authorized a selective declassification of an intelligence report in order to fight a domestic political battle ? but it does mean that Fitzgerald isn’t claiming that Cheney lied about this particular point.
