Who Are Scooter and Hannah?

Talk Left links to a UPI report that two of Dick Cheney's men, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby and John Hannah, are the focus of the FBI's investigation of the Plame leak. (Warning: link is to the Moonie rag, Insight.)

Federal law-enforcement officials said that they have developed hard evidence of possible criminal misconduct by two employees of Vice President Dick Cheney's office related to the unlawful exposure of a CIA officer's identity last year. The investigation, which is continuing, could lead to indictments, a Justice Department official said.

According to these sources, John Hannah and Cheney's chief of staff, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, were the two Cheney employees. "We believe that Hannah was the major player in this," one federal law-enforcement officer said. Calls to the vice president's office were not returned, nor did Hannah and Libby return calls.

The strategy of the FBI is to make clear to Hannah "that he faces a real possibility of doing jail time" as a way to pressure him to name superiors, one federal law-enforcement official said.

Who are these two men?

On Libby:

Libby and Cheney, in highly unusual moves, visited the CIA several times before the war, in what many observers saw as an attempt to pressure analysts to produce more damaging assessments about Saddam Hussein's arsenal or any connection with al-Qaida.

According to a Washington Post report on Monday, Cheney and Libby continued to press the story about 9/11 hijacker Mohammad Atta's meeting with an Iraqi spy in Prague long after the intelligence community had dismissed it. The two even insisted, on the eve of Secretary of State Colin Powell's presentation to the United Nations Security Council last February, that the charge be included in Powell's indictment of Iraq defying the council's resolutions.

On Hannah:

For months, Cheney's office has denied that the veep bypassed U.S. intelligence agencies to get intel reports from the INC [Iraqi National Congress]. But a June 2002 memo written by INC lobbyist Entifadh Qunbar to a U.S. Senate committee lists John Hannah, a senior national-security aide on Cheney's staff, as one of two "U.S. governmental recipients" for reports generated by an intelligence program being run by the INC and which was then being funded by the State Department. Under the program, "defectors, reports and raw intelligence are cultivated and analyzed"; the info was then reported to, among others, "appropriate governmental, non-governmental and international agencies." The memo not only describes Cheney aide Hannah as a "principal point of contact" for the program, it even provides his direct White House telephone number. The only other U.S. official named as directly receiving the INC intel is William Luti, a former military adviser to former House Speaker Newt Gingrich who, after working on Cheney's staff early in the Bush administration, shifted to the Pentagon, where he oversaw a secretive Iraq war-planning unit called the Office of Special Plans.

On both:

Both administration officials said members of Cheney's staff, including chief of staff I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby and John Hannah, the deputy assistant for national security affairs, had worked closely with aides to Rumsfeld to promote the ideas that Iraq had hidden chemical and biological weapons, maintained ties to al-Qaida and other terrorist organizations, and posed an immediate danger to the United States and its allies.

Busy boys. And they might get a whole lot busier.