Vice President Dick Cheney will be called as a defense witness in the much-anticipated CIA leak trial involving his former chief of staff, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, MSNBC reports today.

“We’re calling the vice president,” Libby’s attorney, Ted Wells, said in a hearing. After the hearing another attorney for Libby, attorney William Jeffress said he does not expect the Vice President to resist testifying at the trial scheduled to begin in January.

Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald, responded by saying, “That settles that.” Fitzgerald had said that he did not expect to call Cheney as a witness.

“We don’t expect him to resist,” Jeffress said of Cheney’s proposed testimony.

Fitzgerald said earlier this week that he did not expect the White House to resist if Cheney or other administration officials are called to testify.

The Vice President himself has said in a CNN interview in June, “I may be called as a witness.”

Cheney’s spokeswoman, LeAnn McBride, said in a statement:

“We’ve cooperated fully in this matter and will continue to do so. In fairness to the parties involved and as we’ve stated previously, we’re not going to comment further on a legal proceeding.”

She did not say whether Cheney will appear in the courtroom to testify or if his testimony would be done in an other way, like a deposition or taped testimony. Legal experts said they were surprised by Cheney not resisting testifying, citing personal and institutional reasons.

Fitzgerald he does not intend to examine any witnesses on any topic for which, “we expect an assertion of privilege.”

If Cheney appearsm, he would be the first sitting Vice President to testify at court in a criminal case, according to legal experts.

Cheney, who was Libby’s boss at the White House, has said in interviews on CNN and FOX News that Libby is “one of the finest men I’ve ever known. He is a great guy. I worked with him for a long time. I have tremendous regard for him.”

A series of court filings in the CIA leak case provide details of Cheney’s role at the center of an administration effort to rebut an outspoken critic of the White House’s rationale for the Iraq war in the summer of 2003.

Libby is charged with lying to investigators and a grand jury about his conversations with journalists regarding former CIA operative Valerie Plame.

Plame is the wife of Ambassador Joseph Wilson and worked for the CIA when her husband was sent by the agency to Niger to investigate claims that Iraq was seeking yellowcake for a nuclear program.

Wilson wrote an op-ed in the New York Times, titled, “What I Didn’t Find in Africa,” that the Bush administration somehow, “twisted” some intelligence about Iraq’s nuclear weapons program.

Fitzgerald offered new details of Cheney’s reaction to the article when he filed in court several months ago the handwritten annotations on the newspaper clipping by Cheney himself.

Fitzgerald argues that Wilson’s article itself lies at the center of the sequence of events leading to Libby’s alleged criminal conduct.

The annotated version of the article shows handwritten notes at the top, and underscores within the article by Cheney, that Fitzgerald says reveal the harsh reaction the Vice President had to Wilson’s assertions about U.S. intelligence on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction.

The notes by Cheney seemingly question the CIA’s motivation for sending Wilson on the fact finding trip to Niger.

“Have they done this sort of thing before? Send an Ambr (ambassador) to answer a question? Do we ordinarily send people out pro bono to work for us? Or did his wife send him on a junket?” Cheney writes.

Libby’s attorneys also indicated today that they did not intend to call Wilson as a witness for the defense. Other government officials and journalists are expected to be key witnesses in the trial, which is expected to last six weeks.