Libby Trial Jury Selection Nears End

I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, center, former chief of staff for Vice President Dick Cheney, leaves U.S. Federal Court Wednesday, Jan. 17, 2007 in Washington. (AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais) (Pablo Martinez Monsivais - AP)

WASHINGTON -- The painstaking selection of a jury for the perjury trial of former White House aide I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby is nearing its close, but it may not be the end of disputes over how much jurors should hear about the Iraq war.

U.S. District Judge Reggie Walton intended to finish picking 12 jurors and four alternates Monday in the case against Libby. If the judge succeeds, the process, which started last Tuesday, will have taken twice as long as he originally expected.

Libby's lawyers, Theodore Wells and William Jeffress, have labored to keep opponents of the Iraq war and the administration off the jury. Libby, a former aide to President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney's former chief of staff, is the highest-ranking member of the current Republican administration to face criminal charges.

The potential jurors are drawn from a city where registered Democrats outnumber Republicans by more than 9-to-1.

Defense lawyers asked every juror whether the administration lied about intelligence to push the nation into war in Iraq and whether administration officials are believable, particularly Cheney. He is to be a defense witness.

Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald objected repeatedly during the first three days that Wells and Jeffress were portraying this as a trial about politics and the war. Fitzgerald argued that "the jury will not be asked to render a verdict on the war or what they think of the war."

Defense questions were so political that one juror even volunteered that she had voted for Bush, Fitzgerald complained to the judge.

The prosecutor wants the trial to stick closely to the five felony counts against Libby: that Libby obstructed an investigation into the leaking of CIA officer Valerie Plame's identity in 2003 and lied to the FBI and a grand jury about three conversations with reporters about her.

Plame's name and employer were disclosed in a newspaper column, attributed to two senior administration figures. The column by Robert Novak was published shortly after Plame's husband, ex-ambassador Joseph Wilson, accused Bush of saying Iraq was trying to buy uranium for nuclear weapons long after the administration knew the story was untrue.

Walton said during pretrial hearings that he does not want the trial wandering far from the charges. But he responded to Fitzgerald's objections last week by saying the defense has a right to know if a potential juror "has a very negative attitude to the Bush administration."

So the judge gave Wells and Jeffress considerable latitude. He even let them ask several potential jurors if they could assure the court their opposition to Bush's war policies would not subconsciously influence their deliberations.

In three days, 30 potential jurors were qualified and 19 were sent home.

On Monday, Walton wanted to qualify six more and then let defense lawyers and prosecutors exercise their peremptory, or unexplained, strikes. The defense has 12 and prosecutors, eight.

The lawyers then would give opening statements on Tuesday.

Whatever other arguments over evidence occur, those jurors will hear that Wilson claimed administration officials leaked his wife's identity to punish him and scare other war critics in the intelligence agencies into silence.

They also will hear from the defense that whatever errors Libby made in describing his conversations with reporters in 2003 resulted from innocent memory failure as he was dealing with a wide array of issues involving the war and national security.

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Associated Press writer Matt Apuzzo contributed to this report.