By Michael Abramowitz
Washington Post Staff Writer

For nearly seven years, the office of the vice president has been a virtual black hole for information about the Bush administration. But yesterday, a series of letters aimed at securing leniency for Vice President Cheney’s former chief of staff, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, provided a small, if selective, window on the world of Cheney and his aides.

Lewis A. Hoffman, the vice president’s White House physician, asked Judge Reggie B. Walton to understand “the mindset that was pervasive” in the vice president’s office after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, and the “real fear about what the future held.”

“I can tell you for certain that Mr. Libby worked himself to exhaustion day after day,” Hoffman wrote in a letter dated April 26. “This is a testimony to his devotion to our nation and the Vice President. I also believe that such continuous stress and total exhaustion is just the setting where a person might honestly confuse what he said to who on what day.”

Elizabeth A. Denny, who worked with Libby as the vice president’s social secretary, wrote that her “heart broke” the day Libby walked out of the White House after his indictment on perjury charges in 2005. “I could feel a vacuum sucking the wind out of our office, out of the White House,” she said. “I could feel his absence immediately in a very large way. I still can’t figure it out.”

Full article and a list of letter writers at the Washington Post