CIA leak case

Yahoo! News reported A New York Times reporter has given investigators notes from a conversation she had with a top aide to Vice President
Dick Cheney weeks earlier than was previously known, suggesting White House involvement started well before the outing of a CIA operative, legal sources said.... Miller's notes could help Fitzgerald establish that Libby had started talking to reporters about CIA operative Valerie Plame and her diplomat husband, Joseph Wilson, weeks before Wilson publicly criticized the administration's Iraq policy in a Times opinion piece, the sources said....

If that is the case, then whatever he said could not be "in retaliation" for something that had not yet been printed (unless you can prove Libby has a time machine, or can predict the future).

She testified about a meeting with Libby on July 8, 2003 at the St. Regis Hotel and a later conversation by telephone on July 12, 2003, sources said. But after she testified, Miller discovered that she had additional notes from the June 2003 conversation with Libby. That was well before Wilson on July 6, 2003 published an opinion piece in The New York Times accusing the White House of twisting intelligence on Iraq, but after reports of his mission had begun to surface. A column by Nicholas Kristof in the New York Times on May 6, 2003 may have been the trigger for the interest by Cheney's office, the sources said. Kristof's column contained the first public mention of Wilson's mission in Niger, though Wilson was not identified by name. It also mentioned for the first time the alleged role of Cheney's office in seeking an investigation of the uranium deal, prompting the CIA to dispatch Wilson.

Since Libby knew Kristof was lying, and that Cheney's office had nothing to do with sending Wilson, it is not unreasonable that he might question why the CIA would have chosen to send someone with no experience in WMD.

Top Cheney aides were eager to dispel Wilson's assertion that he was sent to Niger at the urging of the vice president, sources involved in the case said.