AWAITING THE VERDICT The Scooter Libby case has gone to the jury. While waiting for the verdict, it's worth highlighting something pretty extraordinary from Fitzgerald's closing rebuttal yesterday. Fitzgerald repeatedly raised the claim that Libby obstructed the investigation into Cheney's role, and even seemed to suggest it might have been in coordination with Cheney. As the Washington Post put it: "He [Fitzgerald] added that Libby's lies had 'left a cloud over the vice president' because Cheney's role in the leak remained unclear." Fitzgerald also raised the question of why it was that in the fall of 2003, when the investigation was just announced and the president had asked that anyone from the administration with information come forward, Libby shared only one relevant piece of information, out of all the relevant information he had, with one person: he told Cheney, his original source, of his purported recollection that Tim Russert was in fact his source. After seeing a document with evidence that he had in fact learned it from Cheney, Libby went back to the vice president and told him this information. In both cases, Cheney did little more than cock his head. Fitzgerald also walked the jury through the way the OVP's talking points on Joe Wilson changed to reflect Cheney's own response to Wilson's op-ed, which meant, among other things, that the question of who sent Wilson became a top talking point -- and of course the answer that Cheney offered in his own notes to Wilson's op-ed and the answer that Libby is accused of offering to Judy Miller on July 8, talking with her at the behest of the vice president, was Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame. All of this, of course, was designed by Fitzgerald to serve the purpose of making the case to the jury that Libby is guilty of obstruction of justice, perjury, and false statements. But it is impossible not to see it as Fitzgerald also taking advantage of the rare opportunity to begin publicly legitimating the idea that Cheney himself might be an object of suspicion and even, if it were to come to that, indictment. Yesterday, I suggested Fitzgerald had a lot of work to do in this regard if he were still focused on Cheney as a subject of his investigation, as Murray Waas' reporting indicated, and only one real opportunity to make the case -- his public comment upon the verdict. (I just got a hilariously laconic email from Fitzgerald's spokesman, Randall Samborn, clarifying, "in response to numerous inquiries," that "Mr. Fitzgerald will not be available after a verdict for one-on-one interviews or talk shows.") Evidently Fitzgerald acted sooner. None of this means, of course, that Fitzgerald is headed in Cheney's direction, even if Libby is convicted. And I still think Fitzgerald has a lot of work to do to make the notion publicly palatable. But it certainly seems to me that Fitzgerald has put the public and the press on notice that he might be headed in the vice president's direction. I would hope the press notices and, particularly if Libby is convicted, does some more reporting on what Fitzgerald's investigation has disclosed about the Libby-Cheney connection and what it might yet produce.
--Jeff Lomonaco
