Miller and Mr. Judge Walton threw out the charge involving Ms. Miller, ruling that there was no evidence Mr. Libby lied about what he told her on July 12, and the jury acquitted Mr. Libby on the charge of lying about what he told Mr. Libby about Ms. Since, according to the outcome of the trial, Mr.
Plame or confirm her employment after his telephone conversation with Russert, Mr. In addition, the trial revealed that Mr. Plame had any special secret status. Judge Walton barred discussion at trial of whether she actually did have such status.
Libby could have spoken to reporters about her without any repercussions, as Mr. Armitage did. There was another reason that Mr. Libby had no need to invent a story regarding having heard about Ms. Plame from Russert. Libby testified to the grand jury—testimony that was introduced at trial and was uncontradicted by prosecution witnesses—that on July 11, he learned from Karl Rove that columnist Robert Novak was asking the White House about Ms.
Libby could truthfully tell Mr. Cooper on July 12 that he had heard that reporters were saying that Mr. Other ruinous problems for Mr. Why would Mr. Libby attempt to use Russert, a journalist with a high-profile TV news platform and with whom Mr. Libby had a strictly professional relationship, as a cover? Libby lie about a conversation for which he immediately waived any privilege of confidentiality?
Indeed, if Mr. For that matter, if Mr. All these prominent journalists testified that Mr. Libby spoke with them during the period when, Mr. Fitzgerald argued, he was seeking to out Ms. Yet Mr. Libby raised the subject of Valerie Plame with none of them. Lewis Libby to know that Mr. After Mr. Perhaps Mr. Fitzgerald persisted because Mr. Libby never was his prime target. In Ms. Most of Mr. Fitzgerald contended Ms. Plame was not mentioned. Libby on all counts related to Russert.
Nevertheless, Mr. Fitzgerald maintained that Mr. Libby not only lied that Russert told him about Ms. Plame but also that Mr.
Libby committed perjury by testifying to the grand jury that he was surprised to hear Russert mention Mr. Nine months after the event, Mr. Libby said he was surprised for three reasons: that Russert knew about Ms. Plame; that Russert thought it important; and that Russert knew something that Mr. Libby did not. No witness contested that Mr. Libby might have been surprised for the first two reasons. Fitzgerald concentrated on proving that the third reason Mr. Plame— was a lie, not an innocent error.
Of course, Mr. Libby months later could have simply mixed his genuine surprise on the first two points with the third. Memory research shows such confusion is common. But Mr. Fitzgerald successfully fought the introduction at trial of expert testimony about memory. Instead, he summoned a series of government officials and Ms. Miller to the witness stand to show that Mr.
None of these witnesses claimed to know what Mr. Libby was thinking when he testified months later. Rather, all these other prosecution witnesses testified—months, and in some cases years, after the events—about what they recalled had happened in a single sentence of some other conversation in the late spring and summer of From this, Mr. Fitzgerald wanted the jury to infer that Mr.
And Ms. Miller appears to have been tricked into thinking she did. All misremembered or substantially changed their stories between fall and early FBI investigations, grand jury testimony after Mr. Fitzgerald entered the case in December , and trial testimony during the first two months of More disturbingly, the trial suggests that Mr. Fitzgerald may have, as he did with Ms. Miller, withheld information from other witnesses to distort their recollections too.
Without it, Mr. Libby had heard multiple times about Ms. Plame falls apart. For Mr. Fitzgerald put on the stand. One explanation is that the climate of opinion in Washington may have prevented Mr. Libby from getting a fair trial. Based on a review of public records made available to Mr. Given the severe flaws marking the testimony of Mr. Because the heart of Mr. Even as Ms.
Marc Grossman was the first government official that Mr. Fitzgerald called to establish that Mr. Grossman, the undersecretary of state for political affairs at the time, was the third-ranking official in the State Department.
On the witness stand, Mr. His reconstruction, however, was contradicted in multiple ways by his own prior statements to the FBI and by the testimony of Carl Ford Jr. At trial in January , more than three-and-a-half years after the events in question, Mr. Grossman stated that Mr. Libby had asked him in late May what he knew about the then-unnamed ambassador who had traveled to Africa to investigate claims that Iraq had sought uranium.
Grossman, he received Mr. On June 11 or 12, Mr. Grossman told the jury, he informed Mr. Libby in a second face-to-face conversation that Mr. Not a single document backs up Mr. Libby had requested that information, or that he told Mr.
Libby about Mr. In cross-examination, Mr. Grossman the official memorandum of his FBI interview. Contrary to his trial testimony, Mr. Grossman told the FBI that he had notified Mr. Plame over the telephone; he said nothing to the FBI about a face-to face conversation.
Also in conflict with his trial testimony, Mr. Plame, that he had learned about her before reading the Ford memo, and that he had no knowledge of whether Mr. Armitage had received a copy of the Ford memo. Ford stated under oath that there had been no email correspondence about a report in late May. He also testified that if Mr. Grossman had said the information was requested by Mr. Libby, he, Mr. Ford, presented a memo within 24 hours. Grossman was followed on the stand by Robert Grenier, associate deputy director for operations and Iraq mission manager at the CIA.
Under cross-examination, Mr. Grenier acknowledged that he spoke on three occasions to officials investigating the Plame leak: in July as part of an internal CIA probe; in December to FBI agents; and in January to the grand jury. Cross-examination further revealed that Mr. But in July , two years after the telephone call, Mr. I will say that, in fact, my recollection of the conversation with Mr.
Libby has a fair amount of vagueness attached to it. But there were concrete reasons for Mr. Grenier to feel guilty about his communications with Mr.
Unlike previous witnesses who discussed the tense atmosphere inside the West Wing and revealed some of the administration's press strategies, Russert offered little in the way of fireworks.
But the discrepancy between his account and Libby's is at the heart of the perjury and obstruction trial. Libby is accused of lying to investigators about his conversations with reporters regarding Wilson's wife, CIA operative Valerie Plame. During Libby's grand jury testimony, he said Russert told him "all the reporters know" that Wilson's wife worked at the CIA.
Libby now acknowledges he had learned about Plame a month earlier from his boss, Vice President Dick Cheney, but says he had forgotten about it and learned it again from Russert as if new. Libby subsequently repeated the information about Plame to other journalists, always with the caveat that he had heard it from reporters, he has said. Prosecutors say Libby concocted the Russert conversation to shield him from prosecution for revealing information from government sources.
The controversy over the faulty intelligence was a major story in mid Given that news climate, defense attorney Theodore Wells was skeptical about Russert's account. He followed up moments later with, "As a newsperson who's known for being aggressive and going after the facts, you wouldn't have asked him about the biggest stories in the world that week?
Russert said Wednesday he did not believe he said that. Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald has spent weeks making the case that Libby was preoccupied with discrediting Wilson. Fitzgerald has said Russert would be his final witness. Prosecutors spent the past few days playing audiotapes of Libby's grand jury testimony in court.
In the final hours of those tapes Wednesday, Libby described a tense mood in the White House as the leak investigation began. Though President Bush was publicly stating that nobody in the White House was involved in the leak, Libby knew that he himself had spoken to several reporters about Plame.
He said he did not bring that up with Bush and was uncertain whether he discussed it with Cheney. In the "Today" interview, Russert reiterated what he had said on the stand: he did not discuss the wife of former Ambassador Joseph Wilson with Libby in a conversation they had in July and he said he did not at that time know about Valerie Plame, Wilson's wife, who was outed subsequently as a CIA operative.
I did not know any of that until the following Monday when I saw all in newspaper columnist Robert Novak's column. We simply did not know it. I wish we had. Russert did say he was "stunned" when he heard that Libby said he had learned Plame's identity from him, saying, "I said that just can't be. It's impossible. He also disclosed -- in a well-publicized statement -- that he considered his chats with sources all off-the-record unless put on the record, the opposite of the usual journalistic approach.
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