Rep. Waxman seeks access to Bush, Cheney interviews on CIA leak

House investigators pressed their case Tuesday for access to interviews that a special counsel conducted with President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney in the CIA leak case.

Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Beverly Hills) said in a letter to the Justice Department that the transcripts were needed to address what he described as troubling new questions about the role of the White House in divulging the identity of then-CIA operative Valerie Plame in 2003.

Waxman cited passages from the recent memoir of former White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan. McClellan wrote that he thought he had been deceived into telling reporters that then-White House aides I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby and Karl Rove were not involved in the episode. Aside from receiving assurances from the two men, McClellan described a meeting in which Bush and Cheney decided to have McClellan issue a special statement saying that Libby had no involvement.

Libby was convicted of perjury and obstruction of justice in the case. Rove was not charged, but he told investigators that he had spoken with reporters about Plame.

Plame's identity became public as the administration was scrambling to rebut criticism from her husband, Joseph C. Wilson IV, a former U.S. envoy in Baghdad, about the decision to invade Iraq.

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