At the Libby Trial, Hints of Intrigue and Betrayal

WASHINGTON, Jan. 24 — The assertion by lawyers for I. Lewis Libby Jr. that White House aides had sacrificed him to protect Karl Rove, the senior political adviser, appears to be based primarily on Mr. Libby’s own sense that the administration had failed to defend him adequately as the C.I.A. leak case unfolded...

...here may have been other reasons Mr. Libby felt the White House was turning against him. Under questioning from reporters, Scott McClellan, the White House spokesman, said on Sept. 29, 2003, that Mr. Rove had no involvement in the leak of the identity of an intelligence officer, Valerie Wilson. But it took nearly a week before Mr. McClellan made a similar defense of Mr. Libby.

In each instance, Mr. McClellan’s statements, which he said at the time were based upon conversations with Mr. Rove and Mr. Libby, proved to be inaccurate; Mr. Libby and Mr. Rove had spoken to reporters about Ms. Wilson, who had worked undercover... http://tinyurl.com/33ckse [Open in new window]

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Ex-CIA Official Testifies About Libby's Calls
Queries' Timing Key To CIA Leak Case

By Carol D. Leonnig and Amy Goldstein
Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, January 25, 2007; A03

A former high-ranking CIA official testified yesterday that, when Vice President Cheney's agitated chief of staff called him out of the blue in June 2003 to ask what he knew about a CIA-sponsored trip to Niger, he jumped to get answers.

Summoned out of a meeting with the CIA director to take I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby's urgent call later that same afternoon, then-Associate Deputy Director Robert Grenier said he relayed all he had learned about former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, the man behind news reports of the trip that had Libby so concerned.

Yes, Wilson had gone on a CIA-sponsored mission to check out intelligence that Iraq was trying to buy uranium for nuclear weapons and had concluded that the tip was unfounded, Grenier testified he told Libby. And, he told Libby, it appeared that Wilson's wife, a CIA officer, had suggested Wilson for the trip.

The timing of Grenier's response and Libby's anxiety over Wilson are central to the prosecution's allegation that Libby lied to investigators when he said that he believed he first learned CIA officer Valerie Plame's identity from NBC's Tim Russert a month later. Grenier is one of three government officials to testify, so far, that they held conversations with Libby about Wilson's wife weeks before Libby contends he learned her name.

Libby has pleaded not guilty to five felony counts during the investigation of how Plame's identity was disclosed to the media. His defense maintains that he got confused about details of conversations with reporters amid the crush of his work on urgent national security issues.

The second day of trial testimony continued to throw back the curtain on a Bush administration beset with rivalries, self-interested alliances and attempts at blame-shifting. Those efforts were particularly intense during the summer of 2003, with U.S. troops in Iraq still unable to find the weapons of mass destruction that President Bush had cited to justify a preemptive war....

...Ari Fleischer, a former White House press secretary who is expected to testify for the prosecution, also has a motive to help the prosecution, Wells has said. Fleischer had demanded immunity before he would talk about his conversations with Libby, then had admitted to government prosecutors that he had spoken to several reporters about Wilson's wife in the days before he left his job... http://tinyurl.com/2bh99x [Open in new window]

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"There had been a number of anonymous leaks to reporters from the intelligence community during the late spring and early summer of 2003, claiming that Vice President Cheney, his chief of staff, Lewis ‘Scooter’ Libby, and even former Speaker of the House of Representatives Newt Gingrich had pressured analysts to skew intelligence analysts to back up the administration’s preconceived political intentions." – The Politics of Truth; Joseph Wilson; page 6.

TRY THEM ALL!!! They all lied to take us to war.

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