| Page 2 of 5 < > |
Cheney's Fingerprint?
"'Mr. Libby told us he believed they may have talked about it but he wasn't sure,' she said."
Michael Isikoff reports in a Newsweek audio: "This is significant, because it bring Cheney himself far more directly into the case, and for the first time suggests that it was the vice president who wanted the news about Wilson's wife to be circulated to the news media."
  |
Neil A. Lewis of the New York Times calls Bond's statement "intriguing but unexplored" and leaves it at that.
In Other Libby News
Richard B. Schmitt writes in the Los Angeles Times: "Former vice presidential aide I. Lewis 'Scooter' Libby's defense in his perjury trial relies on his contention that he was made a scapegoat to protect White House political strategist Karl Rove from charges of leaking the name of a CIA officer.
"But that assertion was dealt a blow Thursday, when jurors were shown videotapes from 2003 of White House spokesman Scott McClellan telling reporters that Libby was not the source of the leak.
"'There's no evidence of an effort to throw him under the bus,' prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald told U.S. District Judge Reggie B. Walton, arguing -- in the absence of the jury -- that the tapes should be played. . . .
"McClellan ardently defended the White House during a series of briefings in early October 2003. At the time, the Justice Department was just beginning a criminal investigation into the leak, and questions were swirling about the possible involvement of administration insiders. McClellan initially told reporters that Rove had engaged in no misconduct, but the spokesman declined to be drawn into a discussion of the possible roles of others.
"Libby, his lawyers have said, saw that initial reluctance as a sign that unnamed officials were conspiring to have him take the fall so Rove would emerge unscathed. Libby complained to Cheney, the lawyers have said, and a few days later McClellan changed his message, exonerating Libby and a third White House official as well as Rove.
"'I spoke with those individuals . . . and those individuals assured me they were not involved in this,' McClellan told reporters Oct. 10. When asked what 'this' was, he replied: 'The leaking of classified information.'"
David Corn blogs for The Nation: "On Thursday, the prosecution and the defense in the trial of I. Lewis 'Scooter' Libby spent much of the day clashing over evidentiary matters, but, as they battled, each side laid out its core theory. . . .
"The McClellan statements, Fitzgerald argued, were important because they provided Libby a motive to lie. Libby, Fitzgerald contended, had 'put down a marker.' He went to Cheney and had the White House issue a statement that he had not leaked classified information. Days later, he was interviewed by the FBI. He couldn't contradict what he had just forced McClellan to say. So, Fitzgerald maintained, Libby lied. . . .
"Thus, he cooked up a false account: Russert had been his source and at the time of the leak he possessed no certain and official (a.k.a. classified) information about Wilson's wife. . . .
