The Day Scooter Libby Met Tom Cruise...

Deadline Hollywood Nikki Finke January 25, 2007 08:15 AM

Just when you think the news out of Washington can't get any more bewildering... I hear that Tom Cruise's name, and that of his then girlfriend Penelope Cruz, have surfaced during testimony in the recently begun Scooter Libby trial. A CIA official who appeared as a witness recalled a June 14th, 2003, intelligence briefing with Libby where the chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney bragged about just having had a sitdown with Tom and Penelope.

Libby told the briefer how excited he was that he had just met the actors, according to the briefing notations. The subject of the tête-à-tête was Cruise's concern about Germany's treatment of Scientology. Here's what I find so utterly nauseating about this news: that the meeting coincided with a first wave of media stories about how morale was plummeting among U.S. soldiers three months after crossing into Iraq because there seemed to be no American postwar plan to control the chaos.

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