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Libby Defense Portrays Client as a Scapegoat


By NEIL A. LEWIS
The New York Times
January 24, 2007

WASHINGTON, Jan. 23 — I. Lewis Libby Jr., the vice president’s former chief of staff, was made a scapegoat by White House officials to protect the president’s longtime political adviser, Karl Rove, Mr. Libby’s lawyer asserted in his opening statement on Tuesday.


Yuri Gripas/Reuters
I. Lewis Libby Jr. on Tuesday.


The unexpected assertion may foreshadow an effort to put distance between Mr. Libby and the administration.

The statement by the lawyer, Theodore V. Wells Jr., was the first indication that Mr. Libby, who is facing five felony counts of lying to investigators, would seek to deflect some of the blame onto his former White House colleagues.

Mr. Wells did not, however, fully explain the connection between an effort to protect Mr. Rove and the actions that led to Mr. Libby’s indictment. It was also the first sign that there had been fighting within the Bush administration over the C.I.A. leak investigation.

Until Tuesday, Mr. Libby’s defense on perjury and obstruction of justice charges was that he might simply have remembered incorrectly events he had described to a grand jury and to F.B.I. agents. But Mr. Wells told the jury that White House officials, whom he did not name, wanted to protect Mr. Rove because they believed his survival as President Bush’s chief political adviser was crucial to the health of the Republican Party.

Mr. Wells said that his client was innocent and that a decision was made that “Scooter Libby was to be sacrificed,” referring to Mr. Libby by his nickname. It was important to keep Mr. Rove out of trouble, Mr. Wells said, because he was Mr. Bush’s right-hand man and “was most responsible for seeing the Republican Party stayed in office.”

“He had to be protected,” Mr. Wells said.

Mr. Rove, who has not been charged, has acknowledged having been a source for a July 14, 2003, column by Robert D. Novak that first disclosed the identity of Valerie Wilson, who was known by her maiden name, Valerie Plame, as a Central Intelligence Agency officer. The disclosure led to the investigation resulting in Mr. Libby’s indictment.

Mr. Wells’s remarks followed the opening statement of the chief prosecutor, Patrick J. Fitzgerald, who told the jury that the evidence was clear that Mr. Libby had knowingly lied under oath about his conversations with three reporters about Ms. Wilson. Mr. Fitzgerald provided his own dramatic moment of the day when he played audiotapes of Mr. Libby’s grand jury testimony in March 2004.

Before doing so, Mr. Fitzgerald meticulously laid the groundwork for his case that Mr. Libby had lied during those appearances. He first presented charts showing that Mr. Libby learned about Ms. Wilson in conversations with several fellow administration officials in June and early July 2003, and that he talked to reporters and other administration officials about her identity in that period.

Jurors then listened as Mr. Libby’s voice wafted through the courtroom while he sat silently at the defense table. Mr. Libby was heard to say that he believed he first learned about Ms. Wilson in a conversation with Tim Russert of NBC on Thursday, July 10. Mr. Libby also told the grand jury that he had been taken aback by Mr. Russert’s information.

“You can’t be startled about something on Thursday that you told other people about on Monday and Tuesday,” Mr. Fitzgerald said, referring to conversations Mr. Libby had only days before.

Further, he said, Mr. Russert will testify that his July 10 telephone conversation with Mr. Libby did not include any mention of Ms. Wilson. Mr. Libby, he said, had telephoned instead to complain about a talk show on the network.

“The evidence will show the conversation he claims took place about Wilson’s wife never happened,” Mr. Fitzgerald said. “And even if it did happen, he couldn’t have been surprised.”

Mr. Libby is charged with five felony accounts of lying to the grand jury and to officials of the Federal Bureau of Investigation who were investigating the leak of Ms. Wilson’s name to Mr. Novak.

Ms. Wilson’s identity was disclosed just days after her husband, Joseph C. Wilson IV, a former ambassador, wrote an Op-Ed article in The New York Times asserting that the Bush administration, to build its case for war, had distorted intelligence about Iraqi efforts to obtain uranium in Africa.

Mr. Libby had testified that he did not discuss Ms. Wilson’s identity with Judith Miller, a former reporter for The Times, or with Matthew Cooper of Time magazine. Ms. Miller and Mr. Cooper testified that Mr. Libby did, in fact, discuss Ms. Wilson with them.

In the trial’s opening day, Mr. Fitzgerald’s task was to keep the issue before the jury simple: were Mr. Libby’s statements about his conversations with reporters true? To that end, he spoke for only about an hour in outlining his case.

The mission of Mr. Wells, in contrast, was to present the case as hopelessly complicated, thus leaving the jurors in doubt about the validity of the charges. Mr. Wells spoke for nearly two and a half hours, ranging over issues of the reliability of memory; Mr. Libby’s duties, which during the relevant period included crises in Liberia and Turkey; and threats from Al Qaeda on the days that Mr. Libby spoke to reporters.

But his most startling comment was his assertion that Mr. Libby had become enmeshed in legal difficulty because of White House efforts to protect Mr. Rove.

If Mr. Libby and his lawyers press their strategy of blaming the White House, it could prove risky, possibly even jeopardizing chances of a presidential pardon for Mr. Libby if he is convicted.

Mr. Libby, Mr. Wells said, complained to Vice President Dick Cheney that he was being set up as a fall guy. Mr. Cheney supported that view, Mr. Wells said, and handwrote a note saying, “Not going to protect one staffer + sacrifice the guy who was asked to stick his neck in the meat grinder because of the incompetence of others.”

This incident appears to have occurred in fall 2003, when Mr. Libby was troubled that Scott McClellan, then the White House press secretary, had publicly said that Mr. Rove had not been involved in the leak but had initially declined to do the same for Mr. Libby and others in the administration. At that time, Mr. Rove had a major role in guiding Mr. Bush’s re-election campaign.

Interpreting the vice president’s note, Mr. Wells said that “incompetence” was a reference to the fact that the C.I.A. had mistakenly allowed the White House to use inaccurate information in Mr. Bush’s 2003 State of the Union speech about Iraq’s efforts to obtain uranium in Africa. The staff official whom the vice president believed should not be protected, he said, was Mr. Rove. Mr. Libby had been assigned to speak to reporters to straighten out the confusion from Mr. Bush’s speech, a chore Mr. Cheney likened to sticking his head in the meat grinder.

Mr. Wells did not, however, make it clear how the efforts to shield Mr. Rove had caused Mr. Libby to become embroiled in the issue, though he suggested that the attention paid to the disclosure of Ms. Wilson’s name had obliged Mr. Libby to engage in the perilous task of talking to reporters.

Mr. Wells noted that, in his grand jury appearances and in interviews with the F.B.I., Mr. Libby had also said that he first learned of Ms. Wilson’s identity from Mr. Cheney.

The charges against Mr. Libby, Mr. Wells said, amounted to “a weak, paper-thin circumstantial case about ‘he said-she said.’ ”

Sarah Abruzzese contributed reporting.

http://www.nytimes.com/pages/national/index.html