Libby Trial Offered Glimpses of Way White House Worked
Testimony Depicted Lack of Openness, Rivalries Among Aides of Bush, Cheney

By Amy Goldstein
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, March 8, 2007

When he took the stand as the fifth prosecution witness in the perjury trial of I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, former White House press secretary Ari Fleischer testified that the vice president's then-chief of staff "was not somebody who would typically provide information to me."

Whenever he asked Vice President Cheney's most trusted adviser for help, he usually received the same answer. "You should check with Dr. Rice," Fleischer said Libby would tell him, referring to Condoleezza Rice, President Bush's national security adviser before she became secretary of state.

The glimpse of that cool interaction between the press secretary and the vice president's right-hand man was one of many tantalizing insights the trial offered into a White House culture in which even the top aides who surrounded the president were not entirely open with one another.

At the Bush White House described in the Libby trial, news media advisers were frozen out of decisions about how to respond to a crisis, colleagues kept from one another which reporters they had talked with, and the president declassified parts of a highly significant national security document without the knowledge of his chief of staff.

"They seem to have created all these little monopolies, all these little 'need-to-knows.' It creates cleavages internally," said Thomas S. Blanton, director of the National Security Archive at George Washington University, a research group promoting access to government records that has combed through the Libby trial exhibits.

Blanton said the evidence presented at the trial that ended Tuesday in Libby's conviction demonstrates that "this administration's obsession with secrecy" extends to the way Bush's aides interact with each other. In particular, Blanton said, "the Cheney office seems to have raised information-hoarding . . . to a real fine art."

Testimony from eight current and former administration officials, combined with handwritten notes and other evidence, also made clear that a White House that likes to profess an indifference to its public image has at times been quite the opposite on the inside.

Time and again, witnesses gave fresh details of a zeal to manipulate and monitor the administration's portrayal in the news media that reached the top echelons of the White House.

At one point, early in the summer of 2003, Cheney personally directed his staff to watch every television news show that mentioned him, in addition to its customary clipping of published articles, his former public affairs director testified. And witnesses provided a vivid window into rivalries between the vice president's office and other parts of the White House -- and between the West Wing and agencies responsible for diplomacy and national security.

"For six years, the conventional wisdom was, this was an absolutely smooth-running machine with everyone in harness, all message control," said Kenneth M. Duberstein, chief of staff to President Ronald Reagan. "From my gleaning, the sense in the trial was . . . there were competing forces in the White House, competing and tugging."

Taken together, the trial testimony and evidence depict the Bush White House as it operated near the peak of its powers in the spring and summer of 2003 -- when the Iraq war was new and less unpopular, the administration's slump in public opinion had not yet begun, and Republicans still controlled both chambers of Congress.

Libby was convicted of perjury, making false statements and obstructing justice for lying to the FBI and a federal grand jury about when he learned about and whom he told about an undercover CIA officer, Valerie Plame, who is the wife of former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV.

In 2002, the CIA dispatched Wilson to Niger to assess reports that Iraq had recently sought to buy weapons-grade uranium from the African nation. He concluded that the reports were false, and later published a stinging rebuke of the administration, accusing Bush of distorting his findings to justify the invasion of Iraq, and contending that he had been sent to Niger in response to an inquiry from Cheney.

Prosecutors argued at the trial that Libby had told Fleischer and reporters about Plame and her CIA job as part of a White House strategy to discredit Wilson's assertions by suggesting that the agency had chosen him for the Niger mission because of nepotism.

As the multi-pronged campaign to tarnish Wilson's credibility unfolded, the trial demonstrated, participants held information so closely that often one aide did not know what another had done.

Cathie Martin, the vice president's former public affairs director and still a White House employee, testified that on July 10, 2003 -- four days after the publication of Wilson's stinging op-ed piece -- she sat in a hall outside Libby's office while she worked with him on a statement that then-CIA Director George J. Tenet was to give to try to diffuse the controversy over war intelligence.

In a handwritten note, she jotted the initials for a secret National Intelligence Estimate, a pivotal October 2002 document on what the government knew about any danger posed by Iraq's weapons programs.

Martin testified she was advocating on that day that parts of the document be declassified to help fight Wilson's assertions. She did not know, the trial demonstrated, that Bush had already declassified parts of it -- and that Libby had shared them with Judith Miller, then a New York Times reporter. Other evidence showed that then-White House Chief of Staff Andrew H. Card Jr. had also not known about the declassification.

In a similar vein, Martin testified, she attended a meeting convened by Stephen J. Hadley, who succeeded Rice as national security adviser, in which Hadley brought up a report by NBC correspondent Andrea Mitchell. In it, she suggested that the White House was shifting the blame to the CIA for a statement about Iraqi weapons in Bush's State of the Union address, for which the White House later apologized. Irked, Hadley looked around the room, wondering whether anyone at the meeting had been a source for Mitchell's story.

Libby had. But instead of telling Hadley, Martin testified, Libby simply "looked down."

Staff writer Carol D. Leonnig contributed to this report.