Los Angeles Times
WASHINGTON -- Former vice presidential aide I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby’s defense in his perjury trial rests largely on the claim that he was too busy with pressing affairs of state to recall minor events such as conversations with reporters about an obscure CIA employee.
But after nine government witnesses testified in federal court here over the past two weeks, a question is starting to emerge: Given all the time and attention the White House devoted in 2003 to CIA operative Valerie Plame and her husband, former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, how credible is Libby’s apparent forgetfulness?
Libby, 56, Vice President Dick Cheney’s former chief of staff, is charged with obstructing a federal investigation into how the identity of Plame became public in the summer of 2003.
Wilson’s public criticism of the justifications for the Iraq war spawned what the trial has shown to be a concerted effort by Cheney’s office to discredit him. Prosecutors allege that as the administration pushed back, Plame became caught in the crossfire and was exposed.
Libby’s lead lawyer, Theodore Wells, has painted a defense in broad strokes, portraying Libby as a senior official immersed in life-and-death national security issues who may have been the scapegoat in a White House cover-up.
Special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald, by contrast, has been methodically building a narrowly focused case that in large part is being made through the testimony of past and present Bush administration insiders.
That has resulted in a rare inside glimpse into how the White House mobilizes against critics, including an account of how, contrary to claims it made at the time, Cheney’s public-relations machinery was operating full-throttle to rebut the questions Wilson was raising about Iraq’s supposed nuclear weapons capabilities.
Experts said the fact that Cheney’s office was attaching such high importance to the issue would tend to show that it was the sort of thing that would not be easily forgotten.
The government case “turns on showing that the need to link Wilson to the CIA was a high priority for Libby and the kind of thing that he would not forget about and that he would not want to be candid to investigators about,” said Daniel Richman, a former federal prosecutor and a professor at Fordham law school. “The government has been making a strong case for that.”
Legal experts cautioned against reading too much into what the jury may be thinking at this stage of the trial since the defense has yet to put on a shred of evidence. Proving that a senior government official intentionally lied is no easy matter.
And some of the government’s witnesses have demonstrated memory problems of their own, potentially bolstering Libby’s faulty memory defense.
Former New York Times reporter Judith Miller acknowledged under cross-examination last week that when she first appeared before the grand jury she did not remember the first time Libby gave her information about Wilson’s wife. She said her memory was refreshed after she found a notebook in a shopping bag under her office desk.
The closest thing to a smoking gun in the case so far are hand-written notes taken by Libby during a phone conversation with Cheney on June 12, 2003. Cheney told Libby, according to the notes, that Wilson’s wife was a counter-proliferation specialist at the CIA.
Libby has acknowledged taking the notes, but has said he had forgotten that Cheney had passed him the tip by the time he started talking with reporters about Wilson a few weeks later. He has told investigators that he believed he first learned about Plame from the reporters; prosecutors say Libby lied out of concern that he could be charged with leaking classified information.
Trial testimony has indicated that other officials also discussed Plame’s secret resume with Libby around the time he was speaking with Cheney. They include a high-ranking State Department official, a top spymaster from the CIA and Libby’s morning intelligence briefer.
With those witnesses having no apparent motive to lie, legal experts say, their testimony threatens to undercut Libby’s memory defense as his lawyers prepare to put on their case starting Wednesday. They say the cumulative effect of witnesses claiming to have been engaged with Libby on the subject prior to when he claims to have first learned about Plame could be a challenge for his defense to overcome.
“Either these witnesses are wrong in their recollections or Libby will need to convince (the jury) that he simply forgot these multiple conversations,” said Daniel French, a former federal prosecutor who represents a potential witness in the trial. “I think that could be problematic” for Libby.
Jeffrey Frederick, a Charlottesville, Va., jury consultant, said: “What the government had to do was show that this was not a one conversation gig. I think they are doing a very good job of nailing that down.”
Testimony in the case has showed that Cheney was dictating talking points to rebut Wilson, while his public-relations handlers weighed strategic leaks to friendly reporters, among other moves.
Libby was the apparent lieutenant in the counter-offensive, and he seemed to receive his marching orders in the June 12 phone conversation with Cheney that included the reference to Wilson’s wife.
According to the notes from that conversation, Wilson was saying that Cheney’s office had expressed strong interest in the notion that Iraq had sought weapons-grade uranium in Africa. Libby jotted down in the margin the orders he received from Cheney to “get agency to answer that.”
Libby subsequently made a number of inquiries to senior State Department and CIA officials about Wilson and an agency-sponsored fact-finding trip he’d made to Africa in 2002.
The top CIA expert on Iraq, Robert Grenier, testified that Libby had him pulled out of a meeting with then-director George Tenet to discuss the issue in a phone call.
Former State Department undersecretary Marc Grossman said he also felt a sense of urgency when Libby called him, after which he promptly commissioned an internal intelligence analysis.
Both Grenier and Grossman testified that they promptly reported back to Libby with information about Wilson and the trip -- and the fact that his wife was a CIA employee.
After Wilson went public with his criticism in a July 6 New York Times article, saying he’d found no evidence of Iraq seeking nuclear material in Africa, Libby promptly passed on information about Wilson’s wife, prosecutors allege.
Former White House press secretary Ari Fleischer testified that, on the following day, Libby offered the information to him on “the QT” over lunch at the White House mess. New York Times reporter Miller testified that Libby told him about Wilson’s wife the next day, a Tuesday.
Libby told the grand jury that he did not learn the identity of Wilson’s wife until the following Thursday, July 10, in a conversation with journalist Tim Russert, the moderator of the “Meet the Press” program. Libby has said he was surprised to hear that fact from the newsman.
Russert, who is scheduled to testify for the government Monday or Tuesday, has denied that he gave that information to Libby.
