Murray Waas has a new article out with some breaking news. Quoting from the federal Grand Jury transcripts, Fitzgerald obviously has zeroed in on Cheney and this should be really interesting at the trial. Most of us feel that the outing of Valerie Plame was Cheney's idea from the beginning and this new information appears to signal that Patrick Fitzgerald does too. "National Journal"

On March 5, 2004, special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald himself questioned Libby before the grand jury.

Asked by Fitzgerald if he recalled a conversation with Cheney during which they discussed Plame and that she sent her "husband on a junket," Libby replied:

"I don't recall the conversation until after the Novak piece. I don't recall it during the week of July 6. I recall it after the Novak…after the Novak article appeared..."

Fitzgerald then bore down on the witness: "And are you telling us under oath that from July 6th to July 14th you never discussed with Vice President Cheney whether Mr. Wilson's wife worked at the CIA?

Libby replied: "No, no, I'm not saying that. On July 10 or 11 I learned, I thought anew, that the wife—that the reporters were telling us that the wife worked at the CIA. And I may have had a conversation with the Vice President either late on the 11th or on the 12th in which I relayed that reporters were saying that." As Libby further told it, if he discussed with Cheney that Plame was a CIA officer, he had only done so in the context of saying that the information was only an unsubstantiated rumor that he had heard from Tim Russert.

In a subsequent grand jury appearance, a skeptical prosecutor indicated that he found it hard to believe that Cheney would have written the notations he did in the margins of former Ambassador Wilson's July 6, 2003 New York Times op-ed only after Robert Novak's July 14, 2003 column appeared saying that Valerie Plame was a CIA "operative."

"OK," the prosecutor said, before asking, "And can you tell us why it would be that the Vice President read the Novak column and had questions, some of which apparently seem to be answered by the Novak column, would go back and pull out an original July 6th op-ed piece and write on that?"

"I'm not sure...," Libby answered, "He often kept these columns for awhile and keeps columns and will think on them. And I think what may have happened here is what he may have -- I don't know if he wrote, he wrote the points down. He might have pulled out the column to think about the problem and written on it, but I don't know."

Libby then added: "You'll have to ask him." read on...