Suspicious Minds
The Fall Out

So, Cheney officially announced that Libby's duties would be taken over by two individuals, David Addington and John Hannah:

The Vice President today appointed David S. Addington of Virginia to be the chief of staff to the Vice President. The Vice President also appointed John P. Hannah of the District of Columbia as the Assistant to the Vice President for National Security Affairs.

Problem is, these guys are at least ankle-, if not knee-deep, in the hoopla over the Fitzgerald investigation and in the swirling tempest of the selling of the Iraq war to the American public. First, from Think Progress:

Addington provided legal counsel to Libby in helping to divulge Plame’s identity. [ed note: following is from the indictment]

18. Also on or about July 8, 2003, LIBBY met with the Counsel to the Vice President in an anteroom outside the Vice President’s Office. During their brief conversation, LIBBY asked the Counsel to the Vice President, in sum and substance, what paperwork there would be at the CIA if an employee’s spouse undertook an overseas trip.

Next, from Knight Ridder:

Vice President Dick Cheney replaced I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby as his national security adviser on Monday with an aide identified by a former Iraqi exile group as the White House official to whom it fed information on Iraq that turned out to be erroneous.

The Bush administration relied on some of the information from the Iraqi National Congress to argue that Saddam Hussein had to be ousted before he could give banned biological or chemical weapons to al-Qaida for strikes on the United States.
[...]
The vice president's office has previously denied that Hannah received INC information. Cheney's office didn't respond immediately to questions Monday about Hannah and Addington.

The INC's leader, Ahmad Chalabi, now a deputy prime minister in Iraq, was close to Cheney and other senior administration architects of the invasion. The INC supplied Iraqi defectors whose information turned out to be false. It has insisted that it tried its best to verify defectors' claims before passing them to the United States.

On June 26, 2002, the INC wrote a letter to the Senate Appropriations Committee staff identifying Hannah as the White House recipient of information gathered by the group through a U.S.-funded effort called the Information Collection Program. Knight Ridder obtained a copy of the letter and previously reported on it.

The letter, written by Entifadh Qanbar, then the director of the INC's Washington office, identified 108 articles in leading Western news media to which it said the INC had funneled the same information that it fed to Hannah, as well as a senior Pentagon official.

The information included a claim by an INC-supplied defector, Adnan Ihsan al-Haideri, that he had visited 20 secret nuclear, biological and chemical warfare facilities in Iraq.