“When he made the phone call, that’s what I  I interpreted it as, that was unethical,” Mr. McLaughlin responded, according to a transcript of his deposition.

“Not just unethical but illegal?” Mr. Lane pressed.

“Yes, sir.”

In some ways, the hundreds of pages of transcripts of interviews of Secret Service agents  sealed under a court order that expired last week and obtained by The New York Times from Mr. Lane  have compounded the original questions about what actually happened that afternoon, when Mr. Cheney and Mr. Howards, a 55-year-old environmental consultant, came together at the Beaver Creek Resort, about two hours west of Denver.

Police procedural questions about whether Mr. Cheney was lightly patted on the shoulder, as Mr. Howards contends, or hit harder in a kind of straight-arm shove, as one Secret Service agent witness contends, or something in between as other agents have described, have been buried under a recrimination-laced free-for-all over what came next.

About 10 minutes or so after the encounter, well after Mr. Howards had walked away, he was arrested, and the Secret Service agents involved went about preparing their individual statements about what happened.

A spokesman for the Secret Service, Eric Zahren, said that because the case was open, he could make no comment and allow no interviews with the agents involved. A spokesman for Mr. Cheney referred questions about the case to the Justice Department; a spokesman there declined to comment because the suit is continuing.

Mr. Howards spent about three hours in the Eagle County jail. He said that Mr. Reichle had told him he would be charged with assaulting the vice president, but that local law enforcement officials filed only a misdemeanor harassment charge.

That charge was later dismissed at the request of the Eagle County district attorney, Mark Hurlbert, who said in an interview in October 2006 that he had been told that the government did not want to pursue the matter. Mr. Hurlbert said that he could not recall whether Mr. Cheney or the Secret Service had made that determination, though it was his understanding that the vice president did not want to prosecute.