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Politics

Trial a window on Washington

Libby prosecution casts light on how officials used pliant reporters.

By ANITA KUMAR
Published February 17, 2007

WASHINGTON - The trial of Scooter Libby - the highest-ranking Bush official to be charged with a crime - will be remembered not only for the impending verdict but for what it revealed about the inner-workings of the nation's capital:

- The aggressive way the White House responded when questioned about distorted intelligence it used to justify the war in Iraq.

- The sloppy and sometimes incomplete reporting practices used by some of the nation's most prominent journalists.

- The astonishing number of leaks by an administration that claims to loathe them.

Next week, a Washington jury will be asked to decide the fate of Libby, the former top aide to Vice President Dick Cheney now charged with five felonies.

His case began four years ago as an investigation into whether government officials leaked a CIA operative's identity as political payback.

In the end, though, the United States of America vs. I. Lewis Libby has little to do with that. The 12 jurors who will begin deliberations next week are being asked only one question: Did Libby lie?

'Less than zero'

It started with a phone call on June 12, 2003.

Marc Grossman, a high-ranking official at the State Department, called Libby with details about a trip that a former ambassador had taken to Africa.

Grossman told him the ambassador's wife worked for the CIA and appeared to have had a major role in him going.

"I thought the whole business was of less than zero importance," Grossman testified. "I thought the wife was an interesting tidbit, though."

It was the first of a series of conversations Libby would have about the ambassador, Joseph Wilson IV, and his wife, Valerie Plame.

Wilson had gone to Niger a year earlier to look into allegations that Saddam Hussein had bought uranium, a critical ingredient in nuclear weapons. Wilson's conclusion: It was very unlikely.

Libby's flurry of inquiries began after a vague reference to the Africa trip in a New York Times column May 6, 2003.

That month, Libby called Grossman. The next month, he talked to two CIA officials. In July, he spoke to Cheney's spokeswoman, even Cheney himself.

He later passed on the information to two reporters - Judith Miller of the New York Times and Matthew Cooper of Time - and Bush's press secretary.

It wasn't just Libby who leaked.

At least three other high-ranking administration officials told a handful of other reporters from the Washington Post to NBC News.

Nuclear response

None of these conversations would have come to light, but in July 2003, four months after the start of the war, Wilson published a column in the New York Times disputing Bush's claims that Iraq had sought uranium.

Eight days later, Robert Novak, a syndicated columnist known to be friendly to the Bush White House, outed Plame in the sixth paragraph of a column about Wilson's trip.

His sources were described in the column as senior administration officials, but it would be three years before the public learned Libby was not one of them.

The column set off a furor.

Bush vowed to fire any leakers in his administration; none ever were. The White House scrambled to clear the name of top presidential adviser, Karl Rove.

Wilson said his wife's identity had been released in retaliation for his criticism of the president.

That September, the Justice Department launched an investigation.

The rarely used Intelligence Identities Protection Act makes it a crime to knowingly and intentionally reveal a secret agent's identity.

But the two-year investigation did not result in anyone being charged with the leak.

Instead, Libby was indicted in October 2005 on five felony counts of lying to investigators and a federal grand jury and, as a result, obstructing justice.

Gossip and other news

In court, prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald spent 11 days meticulously laying out his case, showing how Libby sought information about Wilson and Plame and then repeated it to others.

Most of the case's key witnesses were journalists - some of Washington's most elite reporters, including five Pulitzer Prize winners.

"It's unprecedented in American history," said Lucy Dalglish, executive director for the Reporters Committee of Freedom of the Press.

The reporters' testimony highlighted both their own weaknesses and the way Washington journalists have come to rely on gossip and innuendo.

Many reporters were forced to admit they could not remember crucial interviews or even interpret their own notes. Miller, the former New York Times reporter who spent 85 days in jail fighting having to testify, acknowledged that she did not remember who else told her about Plame and that she kept important notes in a shopping bag under her desk.

But most of the testimony by the journalists explored the sometimes chummy relationships between them and federal officials who insist on anonymity.

The defense attorney - Theodore V. Wells Jr., who has successfully represented many political figures - blames Libby's bad memory and his stressful job for his faulty statements.

Todd Foster, a Tampa defense lawyer and former federal prosecutor and FBI agent, said defendants charged with perjury often plead forgetfulness.

"The whole thing with perjury is criminal intent," he said. "So you want to show you were confused, disoriented, hit in the head ... that you didn't intend the falsehood."

Too stressed to leak

Libby never took the stand in his defense but had previously told investigators he was confused about where he first heard about Plame.

First, he said learned about Plame in a telephone conversation with NBC News' Tim Russert. (But Russert testified that when he spoke with Libby in July her name never came up.)

Later, after examining his calendar and notes, Libby told investigators he realized he actually learned the information from his boss, Dick Cheney.

Cheney, who kept an article about Wilson's criticisms on his desk, was intricately involved in responding to reporters' questions about the Africa trip.

He came up with talking points for use by White House press officials, helped write a statement for then-CIA director George J. Tenet; told Libby to disclose selected information from classified reports; and spoke to conservative columnists at a lunch.

Lanny Davis, a lawyer who worked in the Clinton White House during several investigations, said he understands how the sheer intensity of Libby's job could cause him to forget.

But he said the vice president's rare involvement in the case - including directing his staff how to respond to media reports about Wilson's trip - elevates the case and makes it more memorable.

"The vice president was actually involved," Davis said. "It's absolutely unprecedented in my experience."

Times researchers Angie Drobnic Holan and Cathy Wos contributed to this report. Anita Kumar can be reached at akumar@sptimes.com or 202-463-0576.

[Last modified February 17, 2007, 00:49:12]