ENTER WOLFOWITZ An interesting twist today in the Libby trial: We've known for a while that one of the actions Libby took in July 2003 that the prosecution contends shows how focused he was on shaping media coverage of the Niger uranium controversy was his transmittal, through another government official, of parts of the October 2002 NIE to the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal. The Journal duly published quotations from the NIE (as well as noting another classified document that we've learned was a key part of OVP's pushback against Joe Wilson) in a July 17 editorial in essence defending the White House and attacking George Tenet. This was before the NIE had been formally declassified -- it happened the next day -- but after President Bush's apparent subterranean declassification of it. Until now, we haven't known who the WSJ's proximate source was, but it was disclosed in Libby's grand jury testimony played at the trial today: it was then-Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz. This is interesting for several reasons. First, it is the first time that the Department of Defense has been brought into the story in any meaningful way. Second, Wolfowitz is of course along with Libby a charter neoconservative and leading intellectual and practical architect of the Iraq failure, so to see him doing Libby's bidding to shape the media narrative fills out the story of the defense the neocons were playing. And third, the fact that Libby had Wolfowitz do it enabled the WSJ to make the deeply misleading claim that the information did not come from the White House, which made the editorial's defense of that same White House appear more independent-minded than it was. (Fitzgerald in his grand jury questioning of Libby also suggested that Wolfowitz proceeded with White House approval.) Libby undertook a related maneuver when he attacked Joe Wilson in his interview with Judith Miller on July 8 only after requesting that Miller attribute the information to a "former Hill staffer."
--Jeff Lomonaco
