Obama’s DOJ is still inventing an “embarrassment exemption” for FOIA, to prevent us from learning what Dick Cheney said to Patrick Fitzgerald as part of the CIA Leak investigation.

Among other stupid claims DOJ made in its latest effort to hide Dick Cheney’s interview report was that, in spite of CREW’s list proving that the public release of investigation materials has always been routine, if a high level White House official thinks it will be routine, he won’t cooperate.

The fact that Dick Cheney’s lawyer has already leaked the contents of his interview with Fitzgerald utterly devastates the government’s arguments for keeping his interview materials secret.

Cheney’s lawyer attended Cheney’s Fitzgerald interview. Does the cover story he told reflect what Cheney said in his interview?

An annotated version of all the information DOJ doesn’t want you to see in Cheney’s interview with Fitzgerald–and where that information already exists in public form.

Jeffery Smith makes the same errors on the CIA Leak case that reporters have been making for years.

Mary pointed me to DOJ’s latest attempt to prevent CREW from accessing the materials relating to Cheney’s interview with Fitzgerald and the FBI. I’ll get into what a load of crap the DOJ argument is later. But first, I want to lay out what the FOIA declarations say about the Cheney interview itself.

First, the date.

Still more questions about the email searches revealed in the latest document dump.

William Ockham made a really important discovery. One of the files turned over to CREW has search files from September 2004 relating to the Plame investigation. Look at pages 44-46 for Rove and Cooper searches and page 49 for Plame Wilson Novak searches.

Of particular interest, here are the days on which they were apparently searching for Plame Wilson Novak emails dated:

May 1, 2003
May 9, 2003
May 16, 2003
May 27, 2003
June 2, 2003
June

We might yet get to see Cheney’s interview in the CIA Leak case.