Prosecutor seeks to indict Cheney aide

[Paciente]

Prosecutor seeks to indict Cheney aide

WASHINGTON (AFX) - Lewis Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, is expected to be indicted Friday as part of special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald's probe of a leak that revealed the identity of an undercover CIA agent, according to news reports.

Fitzgerald isn't expected to seek an indictment Friday of Karl Rove, the White House deputy chief of staff and a longtime adviser to President Bush, reports said, but is expected to remain under investigation.

The developments could shake up the already batttered White House and come the day after the nomination of President Bush's Supreme Court pick Harriet Miers was withdrawn after facing a storm of political criticism from the president's own party.

Fitzgerald is expected to release paperwork regarding the case at noon ET, followed by a news conference at 2 p.m.

The indictments are the result of a nearly two-year investigation into whether White House officials leaked the identity of Valerie Plame, an undercover CIA agent. The investigation expanded to include potential allegations of perjury and conspiracy against some of President Bush's closest advisors.

Plame's husband, former diplomat Joseph Wilson, has charged that the White House deliberately revealed his wife's identity to reporters as part of a dirty-tricks campaign designed to discredit him after he wrote an opinion piece in 2003, published in the New York Times, challenging the administration's assertion that Saddam Hussein was seeking nuclear-weapons material from Niger.

Wilson was sent to Niger by the CIA in 2002 to investigate claims Iraq had been seeking to purchase uranium ore, a key assertion in Bush's 2003 State of the Union address.

A few days after Wilson's op-ed piece was published in the New York Times, syndicated columnist Robert Novak wrote that "two senior administration officials" had told him that Wilson's trip had been engineered by Plame, who Novak identified as a CIA employee. The column sparked the investigation.

In December 2003, Bush appointed Patrick Fitzgerald, the U.S. attorney in Chicago, to head the investigation. As special prosecutor, Fitzgerald pressured several journalists to discuss off-the-record conversations with White House officials.

At the time, Bush said anyone involved in the leak would be fired. He has since amended the statement, saying he would fire anyone who was found to have committed a crime as some of the nation's most prominent journalists revealed off-the-record conversations Rove and Libby.