THE PREZ HIMSELF. The jury in the Scooter Libby trial is in the midst of listening to the conclusion of Libby's grand jury testimony. I will comment in more detail on what Libby told the grand jury once I have had a chance to look at the transcripts closely, but for now I want to flag one issue that came up both in Libby's grand jury questioning and also in the context of the hearing, first thing yesterday morning, on whether David Sanger of The New York Times could quash the subpoena to appear as a witness for the defense. That issue is the notorious October 2002 NIE, whose rather weak inclusion of the Niger story served as a key talking point for OVP in the pushback against Joe Wilson in July 2003. A crucial part of Libby's story is that the point of his two-hour-long meeting with Judith Miller on July 8, 2003 in a hotel restaurant was to give her an exclusive on the NIE, at the behest of Cheney, and that in preparation for it, Libby and Cheney had the classified document declassified specially for the purpose by President Bush. The trouble with this story is that in fact Libby was leaking the NIE -- albeit in smaller selections -- to numerous other journalists in the same period, including David Sanger, six days before he leaked to Miller. The defense has tried very hard to keep evidence of leaks of the NIE before the leak to Miller -- which also include a leak to Bob Woodward on July 27 -- out of the trial, because they don't want Libby portrayed as someone who was anything other than very careful with classified information. But there is another reason skepticism about Libby's story on this count is interesting. You can discern in Fitzgerald's skeptical questioning of Libby before the grand jury that he suspected that the NIE story was a cover story -- to cover for the fact that, as Fitzgerald later confirmed when he questioned Miller, Libby was leaking Valerie Plame's identity to Miller. Of course, from Fitzgerald's perspective, there is no way Libby and Cheney would have contrived the NIE story as a cover story just to protect Libby; indeed, as these things work, one wouldn't involve the president to cover for the vice president. That means the suspicion, at least at some point, must have been that the story was contrived to cover for the president's own role in the pushback against Wilson and perhaps even in authorizing disclosure of Plame's identity. Bush himself was questioned by Fitzgerald in June 2004. It is very unlikely that we will get anywhere near this issue at trial; and it's unclear if Fitzgerald even remains skeptical that the NIE story was a cover story -- although he was hinting at it as late as in pretrial hearings. One of the many questions likely to remain unanswered by the end of Libby's trial is what role, if any, the president played in the pushback against Wilson and the decision to use information about his wife in that pushback.
--Jeff Lomonaco
