GUEST STAR OF THE LIBBY TRIAL: CHENEY. Jury selection began today in the trial of I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, former Chief of Staff to Vice President Cheney, on five counts of obstruction of justice, perjury, and false statements. Opening statements are expected early next week. (I'll be doing a few posts from the trial here on Tapped.) This trial is the first and, for all we know, the only fruit of Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald's three-year-long inquiry into how the cover of CIA officer Valerie Plame Wilson was blown and whether anyone violated the law in doing so.
U.S. District Judge Reggie Walton has been emphatic in keeping the trial focused on Libby's alleged lying about his conversations with reporters Tim Russert, Judith Miller and Matt Cooper in July 2003, which Fitzgerald has charged was part of Libby's effort to obstruct the investigation. Despite this narrow framing of the issues at trial, however, it will be a dramatic public event for at least two reasons.
First, the events about which Libby is accused of lying involve the intersection of top government officials and elite DC reporters as they negotiated the prewar intel fiasco that turned out to be the beginning of the unraveling of the Bush administration. The trial will not be a forum for debating that fiasco; but it will be an occasion for publicly revisiting it.
Second, we are going to get unprecedented insight into the workings of the most powerful and most secretive Office of Vice President in history. As we just learned this morning, there are fifteen present or former members of the vice president's office who are likely to be witnesses or to come up in the course of the trial. The most spectacular, of course, will be Cheney himself, whom the defense has indicated it will call as a witness. We may in fact learn more from key Cheney aides like David Addington and Cathie Martin. One of the central questions about the trial is just how Fitzgerald intends to portray Libby's acting on behalf of Cheney. Information from pretrial motions has revealed a vice president intensively focused on responding to Joe Wilson's incendiary July 6 op-ed accusing the Bush administration of twisting the prewar intel. Cheney took unusual steps, such as directing media strategy himself, and in that context instructed Libby to leak classified information to reporters. Is Fitzgerald going to seek to show that one of the reasons Libby lied was to cover up the fact that Cheney directed him to leak Plame's CIA identity? Or is he going to suggest that Libby leaked information about Plame on his own -- and lied in order to prevent political embarrassment to the White House and to keep his own job? Either way, we are about to learn a lot more about how the vice president's office responded to a crisis of integrity from which it never recovered.
--Jeff Lomonaco
