Libby Trial Sheds Light on White House

I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby leaves U.S. Federal Court after today's proceeding in his perjury trial in Washington, Thursday, Feb. 8, 2007. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert) (Gerald Herbert - AP)

Cheney told Libby to speak with selected reporters to counter bad news. He developed talking points on the matter for the White House press office. He helped draft a statement by then-CIA Director George Tenet. He moved to declassify some intelligence material to bolster the case against Wilson.

Cheney even clipped Wilson's column out of the newspapers and scrawled by hand on it: "Have they done this sort of thing before? Send an ambassador to answer a question? Do we ordinarily send people out pro bono to work for us? Or did his wife send him on a junket?"

Cheney and Libby discussed the matter multiple times each day, according to Libby's grand jury testimony.

A former Cheney press aide, Cathie Martin, testified she proposed leaking some news exclusives but was kept partly in the dark when Cheney ordered Libby to leak part of a classified intelligence report. Later she arranged a luncheon for conservative columnists with Cheney to help bolster the administration's case.

"What didn't he touch? It's almost like there was almost nothing too trivial for the vice president to handle," said New York University professor Paul Light, an expert in the bureaucracy of the executive branch.

"The details suggest Cheney was almost a deputy president with a shadow operation. He had his own source of advice. He had his own source of access. He was making his own decisions," Light said.

Wilson had written that he had not discovered any evidence that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein was seeking uranium in Africa. Wilson also asserted that the administration willfully ignored his findings.

Bush mentioned the unsubstantiated Africa connection in his State of the Union address in 2003. The White House and the CIA disavowed the 16-word assertion shortly after Wilson's criticism appeared in print.

A week after Wilson's article, his wife's CIA employment was disclosed in a column by Robert Novak, who wrote that two administration officials told him she suggested sending the former ambassador on the trip.

The disclosure led to a federal investigation into whether administration officials deliberately leaked her identity. Her job was classified and it is a crime to knowingly disclose classified information to unauthorized recipients.

Libby, 56, is not charged with that. He is charged with lying to the FBI and obstructing a grand jury investigation into the leak of Plame's identity. Libby is the only one charged in the case.

Cheney was upset by Wilson's suggestion that his trip was done at the vice president's behest and that the vice president had surely heard his conclusions well before Bush repeated the Niger story in his speech.