How This White House Operates

"Fleischer also reinforced the prosecution's central argument: that Libby had been so determined to learn and spread information about Wilson and Plame that he could not have forgotten his efforts."

Greg Miller writes in the Los Angeles Times that "in some ways the legal significance of Fleischer's testimony was overshadowed by the insider account he provided into the administration's handling of the unraveling of its case for war with Iraq.

"That unraveling accelerated July 6, 2003, when Wilson disclosed in a newspaper column that he had been sent by the U.S. government to Niger in 2002 to investigate the uranium claim and found it baseless -- about 11 months before Bush repeated the allegation in the State of the Union address.

"At first, Fleischer said, he tried to contain the damage by telling reporters that Wilson's account amounted to 'Zero. Nada. Nothing new there.'

"White House officials hoped the story would die after acknowledging problems with the Niger claim and admitting the day after Wilson's column appeared that it 'did not rise to the level' of a mention in a State of the Union address. Instead, Fleischer said, 'that basically started the controversy and made it flame up and become the dominant issue.'"

Scott Shane writes in the New York Times: "As White House press secretary, Ari Fleischer was the omnipresent television face of government power, the confident insider who spoke for President Bush and seemed to know everything but reveal only what he chose.

"In fact, as Mr. Fleischer disclosed in court testimony on Monday, he only knew what the truly powerful chose to tell him, and sometimes that was not much. On occasion he would pronounce with great authority the administration's position on a topic only to find it had changed and nobody had bothered to let him know."

Fleischer said that after hearing about Plame's identity from both Libby and then-communications director Dan Bartlett, he passed the news along to two reporters.

"The reporters, David Gregory of NBC News and John Dickerson, then of Time magazine, were unimpressed, Mr. Fleischer recounted.

"'They didn't take out their notebooks,' he said. 'They didn't ask any follow-up questions. It was a great big "so what." '

"This, Mr. Fleischer acknowledged, was not unusual.

"'Like a lot of things I said to the press, it seemed to have no impact,' he said, provoking loud guffaws from the score of reporters in the courtroom -- including Mr. Dickerson, now with the online magazine Slate."