I don't think the oath matters. If he wasn't under oath, it's a false statement charge. If he was, it's a perjury charge. But both have the same penalty - 5 years.
.... Also, a putative defendant may be able to cure a perjurious statement before the grand jury by going back and 'fessing up, if it was not particularly material to the crime, as Rove may have done with his Matthew Cooper conversation, but that option does not appear in the false statement statute.
In going through TalkLeft's archives, I noticed a curious piece of timing: George Tenet resigned the day after the press reported that Bush had sought private legal advice regarding the probe.
As to whether Cheney lied to the American people when he said on Meet the Press that he didn't know Wilson or who sent him to Niger, I think Cheney is splitting hairs. While Joseph Wilson agrees the two have never met in person, it's pretty inconceivable Cheney didn't know of Wilson from the days when Dick Cheney was Defense Secretary under former President Bush during Gulf War I and Joseph Wilson was charge d'affaires in Baghdad.
On a related note, Vanity Fair reported (Jan. 2004):
After Wilson returned to America, a C.I.A. reports officer visited him at home and later debriefed him. Since Wilson's trip had been made because of Cheney's office's request, he assumed that the vice president had received at least a phone call about his findings. "There would have been a very specific answer provided ... to the very specific question that he asked," Wilson says. (The vice president's office denies that Cheney heard back from the C.I.A. or knew about Wilson's trip until he read about it in the newspaper many months later. Tenet confirmed the trip was made on the C.I.A.'s "own initiative." ) (emphasis supplied.)
Was Cheney's office referring to Walter Pincus' June 12, 2003 article, Nicholas Kristof's May, 2003 article, or Joe Wilson's July 6, 2003 op-ed? If Libby's notes are correct that he and Cheney discussed Wilson's wife employment at the CIA and Wilson's trip to Africa on June 12, 2003, it can't be Wilson's op-ed.
In the end, I think Cheney gets a pass. He probably told Fitzgerald back in June, 2004 when he was interviewed that he learned of Wilson's trip in June, 2003 after reading about Wilson either in Kristof's or Pincus's column and then ordered up more information. Maybe that's how the June 10 memo came about - which also mentioned Valerie Wilson by her married name, not as Valerie Plame. The memo was ordered up by State Department official Marc Grossman, reportedly in preparation for a meeting at the White House. This is the memo that was sent to Colin Powell on Air Force One on July 7, 2003.
Fitzgerald probably has had Lewis Libby's notes of his June 12 meeting with Cheney all along.
But, if Joseph Wilson is correct that Libby and the White House Iraq Group began investigating him back in March, 2003, then Libby (and perhaps Cheney) has a problem. It was before any reporters wrote about Wilson, so Libby could not have learned it from a reporter. Cheney or Libby could, however, have learned it from Wilson's March, 2003 CNN appearance (same link.)
