McClellan to Testify on Plamegate Claims

None of them sought the spotlight—at first

(NEWSER) - Some people set out to be famous; other people are made famous accidentally—and then they either run with it (see Levi Johnston) or don’t (see the guy that Dick Cheney shot). Newsweek runs down the top 10 accidental celebrities:

• Harry Whittington: He probably made Dick Cheney angry, and then the veep shot him just to prove that he’s so evil, Whittington would actually apologize to him for the incident later.
• Valerie Plame Wilson: The former CIA officer who was outed by the government calls her fame “celebrity of the worst kind.”

New docs show former veep thought ill of Plame husband's Nigeria trip

(NEWSER) - Dick Cheney's memory may have been a little iffy about the Valerie Plame leak, but Politico reports that the former veep left no room for doubt about his opinion of her husband's trip to Niger to investigate an Iraqi purchase of plutonium. "It was amateur hour out at the CIA," Cheney told a federal prosecutor in a 2004 interview released Friday. More»

VP comes up blank on specifics in newly released interview

(NEWSER) - After years of effort by the Bush and Obama administrations to keep documents related to the CIA leak case secret, redacted portions of the special prosecutor’s 2004 interview with Dick Cheney released today show plenty of nothing. The then-VP apparently suffered acute memory loss: Cheney told Patrick Fitzgerald he couldn't recall when he learned Valerie Plame was a CIA agent, or telling chief of staff Scooter Libby about it, or telling Libby to leak the info to reporters. More»

But government can redact certain portions

(NEWSER) - A federal judge has ordered the FBI to release most of the interview it conducted with Dick Cheney over the Valerie Plame case, in response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit. Both the Bush and Obama administrations have tried to keep the record of the 2004 sit-down sealed, arguing that it would dissuade future presidents and vice presidents from cooperating with law enforcement. More»

(NEWSER) - Dick Cheney pursued a pardon for former aide Scooter Libby so doggedly in his final days in office that he pushed the bounds of his 9-year relationship with George Bush, reports Time. It wasn't so much a political issue as a moral "crusade" for Cheney, write Massimo Calabresi and Michael Weisskopf. He implored Bush not to leave "anyone on the battlefield" and said anything less than a full pardon would tarnish their legacy in the war on terror. "Cheney really got in the president's face," says one source. "He just wouldn't give it up." More»