HiddenMysteries: Lies and Leaks Have Cast A Cloud Over The White House

Defense lawyers and prosecutors in the perjury trial of I. Lewis Libby Jr. made their final summations on Tuesday, offering the jury two starkly different ways to evaluate the evidence presented over the last few weeks.

In their closing statements, the prosecutors presented a detailed and businesslike summing up of their case that Mr. Libby willfully lied to both a grand jury and F.B.I. agents investigating the leak in the summer of 2003 of the identity of a C.I.A. operative, Valerie Wilson.

Theodore V. Wells Jr., Mr. Libby’s chief defense lawyer, countered with an intensely emotional defense ending in a choked sob. He argued that Mr. Libby’s testimony to the grand jury and his interviews with the Federal Bureau of Investigation may have contained inaccuracies but that they were the result of innocent memory lapses explained by his pressing schedule of national security issues.

Unlike the prosecutors, Mr. Wells stalked about the courtroom during his summation, his cadence and pitch varying, but his tone of outrage constant.

“If it turned out that what he said was wrong that doesn’t mean he is a liar,” Mr. Wells told the jury. “It means he may have misrecollected what happened.”

Mr. Libby, who faces five felony counts, was Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff in the summer of 2003 when Ms. Wilson’s identity was first disclosed publicly. The jury is expected to begin its deliberations on Wednesday, after final instructions from Judge Reggie B. Walton.

In his closing argument, Patrick J. Fitzgerald, the chief prosecutor, said that disclosure of Ms. Wilson’s identity was used by the White House to discredit her husband’s assertions that the Bush administration had distorted intelligence to justify invading Iraq. He said the disclosure of her name cast a cloud over the Bush White House in general and over Mr. Cheney in particular.

But Mr. Wells argued for the defense that when Ms. Wilson’s name was first disclosed in the summer of 2003, Mr. Libby had been so preoccupied with growing questions about the inability of United States forces in Iraq to find any unconventional weapons, a principal justification for going to war, that he did not have time to pay attention to the issue of Ms. Wilson.

“The wheels are falling off the Bush administration,” Mr. Wells said. “Thousands of young kids are on the ground there. It’s a crazy period.”

“This is a man with a wife and two children; he is a good person,” Mr. Wells told the jury in his final words. “He’s been under my protection for the last month. I give him to you. Give him back to me.”

With that, Mr. Wells teared up, sobbed audibly and sat down.

Mr. Fitzgerald and Peter Zeidenberg, another prosecutor, told the jury that Mr. Libby learned about Ms. Wilson’s role as a Central Intelligence Agency employee from several of his fellow Bush administration officials. He then discussed her with reporters, they said, as part of an effort to discredit the claims made by her husband, Joseph C. Wilson IV, that the administration had twisted intelligence about Iraq’s efforts to obtain uranium from Africa to justify going to war.

“Mr. Libby had a motive to lie and the motive matches up exactly with the lie he told,” Mr. Fitzgerald told the jury. “He made up a story and stuck to it.”

Ms. Wilson’s identity was first disclosed in a July 14, 2003, column by Robert D. Novak. Only days before, The New York Times had published an Op-Ed article by her husband recounting how he had been sent to Niger to investigate reports that Iraq was trying to buy uranium for its weapons program. He asserted that there was no truth to President Bush’s claim in the January 2003 State of the Union address that there was evidence of Iraqi efforts to obtain uranium from Africa.

Mr. Novak wrote that Mr. Wilson was chosen for the Africa mission by the C.I.A. at the suggestion of his wife. That assertion, echoed by other critics of Mr. Wilson, tended to diminish the importance of his trip, with its suggestion of nepotism.

Mr. Fitzgerald seemed for the first time to lend his weight publicly to the assertion by critics that Ms. Wilson’s identity was disclosed to punish Mr. Wilson and undermine his credibility.

Mr. Fitzgerald said the disclosure of Ms. Wilson’s identity had left “a cloud over the White House over what happened” as well as a cloud over Mr. Cheney because he had been behind the effort to counter Mr. Wilson’s charges.

Neither Mr. Libby nor anyone else was charged with unlawfully disclosing Ms. Wilson’s identity. But Mr. Libby was charged with misleading the grand jury and investigators.

“Don’t you think the American people are entitled to a straight answer?” Mr. Fitzgerald asked of the jury. He said that “a critic points fingers at the White House and as a result his wife gets dragged into the newspapers.”

He said Mr. Libby “made a gamble, he threw sand in the eyes of the grand jury” rather than tell the truth and risk being prosecuted for leaking her name.

Mr. Zeidenberg began the day for the prosecution by telling the jury that the parade of witnesses the government had presented demolished the contention of Mr. Libby’s lawyers that he merely had a bad memory and forgot a whole series of conversations he had about Ms. Wilson.

“He claims he forgot nine conversations with eight people over a four-week period,” Mr. Zeidenberg said. He was referring to a former spokeswoman for Mr. Cheney, a senior State Department official and two C.I.A. officials, all of whom testified that they had informed Mr. Libby in early July 2003 of Ms. Wilson’s role at the agency and three reporters who spoke to Mr. Libby in that period. Mr. Zeidenberg then noted that Mr. Libby had sworn under oath that those people must have been wrong because he learned of Ms. Wilson’s identity days later on July 10 or 11 from Tim Russert of NBC News.

Both sides agreed that Mr. Russert’s testimony was crucial to the case.

Mr. Wells’s response to the prosecution’s claim of an avalanche of testimony from so many people was to try to convince the jury that only two of the witnesses counted in the indictment, Mr. Cooper and Mr. Russert.

Mr. Wells set about disparaging Mr. Russert’s credibility and memory. “In a case where what is at stake is a man’s freedom and reputation, you have to in this situation give the benefit of the doubt to Mr. Libby,” Mr. Wells said.

Mr. Wells argued that Mr. Libby held one of the world’s most high-stress jobs and was trying to prevent another attack like the ones on Sept. 11, 2001. “He was bombarded with a blizzard of information,” Mr. Wells said, noting the intelligence briefings Mr. Libby received daily. “Those briefings would make your toes curl,” he said.

Mr. Fitzgerald countered that Mr. Russert’s testimony was not needed to convict Mr. Libby. “If Tim Russert were run over by a bus and had gone to the great news desk in the sky, you can still find plenty of evidence that the defendant lied,” he said.

Suevon Lee contributed reporting.

http://www.nytimes.com

Lies and Leaks Have Cast A Cloud Over The White House

Tuesday, February 20 2007 @ 11:33 PM CST