The Libby Trial

Patrick Fitzgerald wraps up his case today in the the Scooter Libby trial by bringing to the stand Tim Russert (you know, the guy who hates Chris Matthews. All this week, the jury has been listening to the tapes of Libby's grand jury testimony, which will be released publicly after the trial. For now, we can go by the liveblogging at Firedoglake for juicy tidbits. What generally emerges is that Libby was, well, lying: claiming that he only heard about Valerie Plame from Russert, when in fact every other prosecution witness claims they heard about Plame from Libby, BEFORE he ever talked to Russert. This matches with testimony from FBI agent Deborah Bond, who added another contradiction into the mix:

(Bond) described the bureau's interview with I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby on Oct. 14, 2003. Asked where he first learned of Ambassador Joe Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, he had told the FBI then -- from the vice president, on or about June 12 that year, in a telephone conversation.

Vice President Cheney had also said that she worked in "CP" or counter-proliferation at the agency. How did Cheney know this? From someone at the CIA -- possibly director George Tenet, but Libby wasn't sure.

How to explain Libby originally claiming he had first heard about Wilson's wife from NBC's Tim Russert in July? He had simply forgotten he had actually heard it from the vice president a month or more earlier, Libby said. But Libby's notes, produced by prosecutors during this testimony, did show notations from June 12 regarding Wilson's wife. And Libby later confirmed this in a second FBI interview.

An even more damaging bit of evidence, not just to Libby but to the entire executive branch, was this note written by Vice President Cheney to Scott McClellan, which demands that Libby get the same denial of involvement from the Press Secretary afforded Karl Rove.

Has to happen today.

Call out to key press saying same thing about Scooter as Karl.

Not going to protect one staffer & sacrifice the guy this Pres. that was asked to stick his neck in the meat grinder because of the incompetence of others.

"This Pres." is crossed out. Could this mean that the President was personally involved in asking to protect Rove while Libby had to, as the VP put it, stick his neck in the meat grinder? Was the President ASKING Libby to be sacrificed to save his political director?

And there's more evidence of Bush's possible involvement.

One "very startling moment" occurred when a tape of Libby's grand jury testimony included references to President George Bush.

"There was one other very startling moment, referring to President Bush, in Scooter Libby‘s Grand Jury testimony on audiotape. Libby noted on a piece of paper a notation, and prosecutors asked whether the notation shows that President Bush was interested in the Kristof article on the State of the Union," Shuster said. "It was a Kristof article in May of 2003 which first got the White House thinking about Ambassador Wilson, because it talked about an ambassador‘s trip, which essentially undercut the State of the Union speech."

Shuster continued, "Libby was asked about the president‘s interest and he said, yes, that‘s what my notes signals, but Libby then went on to testify he never discussed the president‘s interest with the vice president, nor did Libby speak about it with President Bush. He went on to testify that he only heard about the president‘s interest from a senior staff meeting. Of course, we don‘t know if Libby was telling the truth, but it was certainly a tantalizing bit of testimony."

So was Bush involved in pushback on Joe Wilson from even BEFORE his writing of the now-famous op-ed? Later on in the day, the FDL liveblog claims that Libby said he had the President's approval to leak favorable portions of the 2003 NIE on Iraq to Judith Miller.

This case has so many interesting twists and turns, and today's testimony will put a cap on it for the prosecution. But I'm interested in further pursuing this line of inquiry about the President. His possible personal involvement in the leaking a CIA agent's name, at a time when he was claiming he'd fire anyone involved, would be a crushing blow to his already weakened state. Nobody's getting off easy in this trial.