(Mark Pellin, Headline USA) The gunshot victim of former U.S. vice president and longtime deep state operative Dick Cheney succumbed to illness and died Saturday night, closing the chapter on one of the more bizarre incidents in vice presidential history.
Harry Whittington, 95, was a Texas attorney in 2006 when he survived a hunting accident after Cheney, vice president at the time, shot him while tracking quail.
Whittington’s death was unrelated to any lingering effects from the shooting incident, when Cheney sprayed him with more than 200 pellets from a shotgun, the New York Times reported.
Whittington still had about 30 pieces of shot from the incident lodged in his body, including one near his heart, when he died. The injuries Whittington sustained at the time of shooting were more dire than reported at the time, with doctors subsequently revealing that the had suffered a mild heart attack and collapsed lung.
At the time of the shooting, Cheney was roundly ridiculed not only for pumping his friend full of buckshot — Whittington suffered wounds to his face, neck and torso — but also for being slow to issue an apology. Instead, it was Whittington who issued a mea culpa at the time for causing any undue angst.
“My family and I are deeply sorry for all that Vice President Cheney and his family have had to go through this past week,” Whittington said after emerging from a week’s stay in the hospital and intensive care recovering from the injuries.
Cheney and Whittington were part of an exclusive party that was quail hunting on a private Texas ranch when the shooting took place.
Cheney was cleared of wrongdoing at the time, and his comms team at one point even tried to blame Whittington for stepping in front of Cheney, with the official story being the vice president mistakenly discharged his weapon after wheeling to shoot at a noise in the dusk.
“I’m the guy who pulled the trigger and shot my friend,” Cheney eventually conceded days later when it became obvious the spin control wasn’t working. “You can’t blame anybody else.”
In 2011, Cheney wrote in his memoir, “I, of course, was deeply sorry for what Harry and his family had gone through. The day of the hunting accident was one of the saddest of my life.”
