Thanks to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit and a cooperative judge, the 28-page summary of the FBI's 2004 interview with former Vice President Dick Cheney on the outing of CIA agent Valerie Plame Wilson has finally come to light. It shows him to have done the political imitation of a rope-a-doping Muhammad Ali.

In the interview by Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald, Cheney offered a barrage of denials and dodges of any effort to smear the woman's husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, who went to Niger to check on the Bush Administration's claim that Iraq had sought uranium-yielding material for nuclear weapons.

The contention was the core of Bush's pitch to the United Nations for support of his planned invasion of Iraq in 2003, and was later proved to be fraudulent. After Wilson publicized his finding, his wife's identity as a CIA agent was reported by columnist Robert Novak, with others' fingers pointed at Cheney's chief of staff, Scooter Libby, as the leaker.

Fitzgerald set out on a quest to find the culprit, and although Novak later reported that his source was not Libby, but Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, Libby wound up getting indicted and convicted of lying and obstruction of justice. At the urging of Cheney, President George W. Bush commuted Libby's sentence but declined, despite Cheney's pleas, to pardon him.

Wilson engaged in a long fight with the Bush administration over what he claimed was a political vendetta against him through his wife, whose outing as a secret agent arguably was a federal offense.

But Cheney, the summary said, testified he was "unaware of anyone in the administration conducing any research or completing a research project on either Joe Wilson or his wife. He advised that he never directed anyone on his staff to conduct such a project and no one advised him they were working on one."

According to the summary, Cheney also told Fitzgerald that "there was no discussion of 'pushing back' on Wilson's credibility by raising the nepotism issue, and there was no discussion of using Valerie Wilson's employment with the CIA in countering Joe Wilson's criticisms and claims about Iraqi efforts" to procure uranium-yielding raw materials.

But Fitzgerald's quest for the leaker brought many other public and news media figures under the national spotlight, with then-White House political strategist Karl Rove accused by Wilson of going after him. In September 2003 the White House press secretary of the time, Scott McClellan, went out of his way to exonerate Rove as the suspected leaker.

When that happened, Cheney, according to the summary, "was not happy about it, as it appeared that the White House press office was putting down a marker for some individuals and not for others. Specifically, Vice President Cheney believed that fairness dictated that similar disqualifying statements should be made to the media on behalf of Libby and Elliot Abrams of the NSC (National Security Council), both of whom were the speculative targets of leak allegations by the media that week."

Complaining of the incompetence of the CIA, Cheney said he believed that Libby and Abrams "were being left out there in the public eye as the alleged sources for Novak in the aftermath" of McClellan's clearing of Rove.

Cheney's frequent statements in the summary were peppered with his inability to recall, recollect or remember conversations between himself and Libby regarding Wilson's mission, and the fact he was the husband of a CIA agent. At times Cheney seemed just as critical of the CIA as of Wilson, saying the episode was "amateur hour" at the agency, especially in failing to quash Wilson's implication that his mission was ordered by Cheney.

One of the more intriguing references in the summary is Cheney's recollection that "components of the NIE (National Intelligence Estimate), and some of the findings of the Wilson mission and cables relating to it, were declassified" by Cheney to justify the case for the invasion of Iraq.

It raises the question: Were classified documents made public for purely domestic political purposes? It surely seems so.