Since I'm operating behind a novocain haze, I'm outsourcing my commentary on the Libby verdict to Kevin Drum. The context here is that the Libby trial was really about the administration's efforts to spin the pre-war intelligence, in this case by smearing Joe Wilson when he cast doubt on Iraq's capabilities. But Libby has actually been convicted of obstructing justice, providing a false statement, and two counts of perjury. These are protective crimes -- they serve to protect others higher in the food chain. So, as Kevin says:
Nobody else lied to the FBI and the grand jury. Only Libby. And that makes it pretty obvious that he was trying to hide the one thing he knew that no one else did: the fact that he learned Valerie Plame Wilson's identity from Dick Cheney.
For some reason, in May 2003 Cheney went ballistic over a couple of anonymous statements Joe Wilson made to Nick Kristof and Walter Pincus, statements that weren't especially damaging to Cheney and could have been challenged pretty easily. It's hard to say why (my longtime guess is here), but the end result was that Cheney ferreted out Plame's identity, passed it along to Libby, and told him to put a full-court press on Wilson. Libby thought it was worth lying about this because it threatened to provide a clue to just how involved Cheney had been in spinning the prewar intelligence on Iraqi nukes. That was the one thing serious enough to make them wildly overreact to a couple of otherwise toothless allegations.
In other words, Libby is going down to protect Cheney. Otherwise, his actions make no sense. Nothing he's been convicted on has to do with outing Valerie Plame -- every count is for obstructing the nation from finding out who did.
