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INSIDE POLITICS

Court filing: Cheney may be witness in Libby trial

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Vice President Dick Cheney

SPECIAL REPORT

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The special counsel prosecuting former White House aide Lewis Libby indicated in court documents filed Wednesday that Libby's former boss, Vice President Dick Cheney, could be called as a witness in his upcoming trial.

However, Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald also said that as of now, "the government has not commented on whether it intends to call the vice president as a witness."

In his court filing, Fitzgerald said that because of extensive conversations between Cheney and Libby about a critical newspaper article written by former Ambassador Joe Wilson, "the state of mind of the vice president as communicated to (Libby) is directly relevant" in deciding if Libby made false statements about when and how he learned that Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, was a CIA operative.

Libby resigned as Cheney's chief of staff in October after being indicted on charges that he lied to investigators and a grand jury about how he learned Plame's identity, which was leaked to the media in 2003 after Wilson's article critical of the Bush administration's Iraq policy appeared in the New York Times.

Fitzgerald, the U.S. attorney in Chicago, was appointed as a special prosecutor to investigate the leak.

Libby has denied wrongdoing and pleaded not guilty.

The court documents filed Wednesday were part of an ongoing legal to-and-fro between the defense and the prosecution over broad defense requests for documents related to potential witnesses in the case. The specific focus was a copy of Wilson's critical op-ed piece on which Cheney made handwritten notes.

The defense contends that because prosecutors have conceded the relevance of that document, they should not be able to block its demands for documents related to other witnesses.

But in his filing Wednesday, Fitzgerald argued that Cheney was unique among "potential witnesses" in the case because he was Libby's immediate superior and the two men had numerous conversations about Wilson's article.

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