Libby lawyers pepper Cooper about Rove

WASHINGTON - Reporter Matt Cooper testified Wednesday he thought I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby had confirmed that a prominent war critic's wife worked at the CIA but acknowledged he never asked the White House aide where he'd heard that.

Cooper, Time magazine's White House reporter at the time, became the second reporter to testify at the CIA leak trial that Libby was a source for their learning that Valerie Plame, wife of ex-ambassador Joseph Wilson, was a CIA operative. Libby claims he only told reporters he had heard that information from other reporters.

Libby, ex-chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney, is on trial on charges he lied to the FBI and a grand jury about his conversations with reporters about Plame and obstructed the investigation into how her identity leaked to the public in 2003. He is not charged with the actual leak.

Cooper's appearance allowed defense attorney William Jeffress to ask repeatedly about President Bush's chief political adviser, Karl Rove, because Cooper identified Rove as the first official to tell him about Plame's job at CIA. Cooper said Rove told him that Wilson's wife, rather than Cheney, was responsible for sending Wilson to Niger in 2002.

On July 6, 2003, Wilson claimed in print and on television that what he learned on the trip debunked a report that Iraq was trying to buy uranium there for nuclear weapons. He said Cheney should have learned of his findings long before Bush's used the uranium story in his January 2003 State of Union speech as a justification for war with Iraq.

In his opening statement, defense attorney Theodore Wells claimed the White House was trying in 2003 to blame Libby for the leak in order to protect Rove, although Wells did not explain precisely how that related to the perjury charges against Libby.

Cooper recalled a July 12, 2003, telephone conversation in which he asked Libby whether Wilson's wife worked at CIA and was behind the Niger trip.

Cooper testified Wednesday that Libby responded, "Yeah, I've heard that too," or "Yeah, I've heard something like that, too."

Anticipating the defense attack, Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald asked whether Libby said where he heard that.

Cooper also said he didn't take any notes on that exchange and that he had posed his question to Libby "off the record." Later Cooper said off the record information cannot be attributed to the person but can be used to go get the information from others.

Libby attorney Jeffress pounded on Cooper's acknowledgments and also drew the jury's attention to the extensive notes and memos to Time editors that Cooper produced after his talk with Rove.

Jeffress asked Cooper if he ever asked Libby where he'd heard about Wilson's wife.

His voice dripping with disbelief, Jeffress asked Cooper how he could take his exchange with Libby as confirmation.

"I can't explain that," Cooper replied. "It was late in the day. I didn't write it down, but it is my memory."

"If somebody tells you something off the record, do you take it as confirmation?" Jeffress asked incredulously.

"I did in this case," Cooper replied. "You can use it to go to others and get a more fulsome account" that can be printed.

Earlier Wednesday the first journalist to contradict Libby's version, former New York Times reporter Judith Miller, acknowledged she could not be "absolutely, absolutely certain" that she first heard about Plame from Libby.

But she added, "I have no memory of a prior discussion with anyone else" and her notes do not reflect any prior discussion.

Miller testified she had two conversations about Plame with Libby well before Libby says he learned from another reporter that Wilson's wife worked at the CIA.

Jeffress advised the judge the defense wants to call Times' managing editor Jill Abramson to rebut Miller. Abramson was Miller's bureau chief in Washington in 2003. Jeffress said he anticipated the newspaper would try to quash a subpoena for her appearance and the defense might need time to fight that battle in court.

The Headline Ends With a Question Mark

Wednesday was a good day for the Libby defense. Judy Miller, as the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and the AP’s Matt Apuzzo noted was not an all star witness for the prosecution. I don’t like ploughing a field that’s already been tilled and refer you again to my media bloggers association colleague, Rory O’Connor who has some good thumbnails on the last portion of her testimony (1, 2).

The most amusing witness of the trial was up today, the charming Matt Cooper who with his sloppy notes, shoddy journalism and wry humor brought the old play “Front Page” to life before our eyes. He is the sort of person it would be fun to have dinner with, not the sort of person whose news story should be taken as a bit of serious journalism

Cooper is one of the prosecution’s chief witnesses and surely by now even those who believed in the “Elliott Ness with a law degree” fluff about the prosecutor must be thinking more along the lines of “Get Smart”. In a brutally devastating but gentlemanly low key way the defense destroyed a key prosecution witness. The defense showed through an examination of the internal Time emails and documents that the story that brought Matt Cooper into this, “A War on Wilson?” was something concocted out of thin air.

Cooper’s notes showed he claimed as "confirmation" a minute’s long “off the record conversation”( something never to be considered confirmatory) in response to a question about Wilson’s wife playing a role in this Mission . Libby seems in fact—from Cooper’s own notes (haphazard and mistyped as they are) --to have said very much what he said he did: That he heard that too but didn’t even know if that was true.

The key story “A War on Wilson?” coauthored by Matt begins:

“Has the Bush Administration declared war on a former ambassador who conducted a fact-finding mission to probe possible Iraqi interest in African uranium? Perhaps.”

This war as it turns out existed only in in Matt’s mind. Unless you consider efforts to respond to inquiries about Wilson's claims with the truth to be war or to be as Cooper does “dissing” or “disparaging” Wilson. It seems Libby engaged in perfectly appropriate conduct such as noting all the elements of Wilson's claim were false (Something the bi-partisan Senate Select Intelligence Committee confirmed):Wilson was not sent at the “behest of the vice president; he did not refute, but rather supported, the existing intelligence that Iraq was seeking uranium in Niger; his report never made it to the vice president.

But beyond that, we saw how to meet a pressing deadline while on a summer weekend's jaunt at a country club, Matt took a noncommittal off the record response from Libby, pretended Rove’s statement about Plame had been confirmed by Libby and that he had a third confirmation from his colleague Dickerson who still claims that despite what Fleischer testified to the other day, Fleischer did not tell him about Plame but merely said that if he wanted to know who sent Wilson to Africa he should ask the CIA.

Even better, the quote in the article’s account of Libby’s response to Cooper is not in his notes, wasn’t even in his first draft of the story. It was a revision suggested by someone higher up the food chain at the magazine. It clearly fit better into an account which without factual basis claimed there was a “War on Wilson”.

Cooper, in defense of this shoddy journalism (the phrase “watching sausage being made” was muttered in the media room and not by the bloggers) reminded us that “The headline ends in a question mark."

Clarice Feldman.

http://justoneminute.typepad.com/main/2007/01/the_headline_en.html

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