Free Republic

Jurors deliberated a third day Friday without reaching a verdict on whether former White House aide I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby obstructed the investigation into who leaked the identity of a CIA operative married to a prominent Iraq war critic. After 2 1/2 days of deliberations over the fate of Vice President Dick Cheney's former chief of staff, the eight women and four men went home until Monday.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A jury ended its second day of deliberations on Thursday without reaching a verdict in the perjury trial of former vice presidential aide Lewis "Scooter" Libby, who is accused of obstructing an investigation tied to the Iraq war. The jury of eight women and four men has now spent nearly 12 hours considering whether Dick Cheney's former chief of staff lied to investigators as they sought to determine who leaked the identity of CIA analyst Valerie Plame in 2003 after her husband accused the Bush administration of manipulating intelligence to build its case for war. Jurors are...

WONDERLAND Scooter Libby and Reputation Prosecutions that wreak ruin on a lifetime. The trial of I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby is the closest version of a Red Queen trial this country has had in a long time. One says that knowing it might start a stampede from past defendants laying claim to the most upside-down prosecution. Lewis G. Carroll's account of the Knave' s trial before the Red Queen and White Rabbit is famous for the Queen's dictum, "Sentence first, verdict afterward." But read the full transcript of the mock trial and one will see that the real subject is not...

At the end of each witness's testimony in the perjury and obstruction trial of Lewis "Scooter" Libby, after prosecutors and defense attorneys examined and cross-examined, U.S. District Judge Reggie B. Walton asked jurors to write down any questions they had. Walton would then look through the papers, decide which questions were appropriate and pose them to the witness. Now, as the case heads to the jury, those queries are our best hints about what jurors are thinking. But last week there was a moment when we got a hint, not from a question that Walton asked, but from one he...

WASHINGTON - Jurors deliberated Wednesday without reaching a verdict on whether former White House aide I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby obstructed the investigation into who leaked the identity of a CIA operative married to a prominent Iraq war critic. The eight women and four men heard 14 days of testimony, a full day of closing arguments and more than an hour of instructions from U.S. District Judge Reggie Walton before beginning their discussions. After 4 1/2 hours of deliberation, the jurors went home until Thursday. The jurors include a former Washington Post reporter, an MIT-trained economist, a retired math teacher, a...

WASHINGTON - Jurors began deliberating Wednesday in the perjury and obstruction trial of former White House aide I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby. Libby, the former chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney, is charged with lying and obstructing the investigation into the 2003 leak of CIA operative Valerie Plame's identity. Jurors heard about an hour of legal instructions from U.S. District Judge Reggie B. Walton on Wednesday morning before beginning deliberations shortly before 11:30 a.m. They heard a full day of closing arguments Tuesday after a monthlong trial. The jury of eight women and four men must be unanimous before...

IF, I say IF, Libby is acquitted, Special Counsel Fitzgerald will be re-titled Special Clownshow Fitzgerald. Although Sunday afternoon seems a bit early for speculating on *why* Fitzgerald blew his case, (only partly because it is really Thursday, and mainly because the verdict is not in yet), let me offer this as Fitzgerald's Biggest Blunder: Playing eight hours of Libby tapes from his grand jury testimony. Why? Assuming the jurors are human, after eight hours they were probably reeling, and may be quite sympathetic to the notion that Libby was reeling too. Too bad Fitzgerald didn't have video of Libby...

The lawyers defending I. Lewis Libby Jr. against perjury charges rested their case today, but not before suffering a series of defeats in legal rulings by the presiding judge. The judge, Reggie B. Walton, expressed in the strongest terms yet that he had been misled by the defense team about whether Mr. Libby would take the stand in his own defense ....Judge Walton said he “believed all along in the process that Mr. Libby was going to testify” and that his lawyers were now “playing games with the process.” The juror said that they were wearing the T-shirts (red with...

A summary of testimony from witnesses in the obstruction and perjury trial of former White House aide I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby: PROSECUTION: MARC GROSSMAN: A former undersecretary of state, Grossman said he told Libby on June 11 or 12, 2003, that Valerie Plame, the wife of a prominent war critic, worked at the CIA. Under cross-examination, Grossman acknowledged some inconsistencies in his statements, such as whether the conversations were face-to-face or over the phone. ROBERT GRENIER: The former No. 3 official at the CIA testified that he told Libby about Plame on June 11, 2003. He originally told investigators he...

WASHINGTON - Neither Vice President Dick Cheney nor his former aide I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby will testify at Libby's perjury and obstruction trial in the CIA leak case, Libby's lawyer said Tuesday. Defense attorney Theodore Wells said he advised Cheney's lawyer over lunch that the vice president's testimony would not be needed. Wells also said he planned to rest his case this week without calling Libby. In December, Wells had announced he would call Cheney as a defense witness. Historians said it would have been the first time a sitting vice president would have sat as a witness in a...

WASHINGTON - Three prominent journalists testified Monday that Bush administration officials volunteered leaks about a CIA operative, as I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby's attorneys sought to suggest he was not responsible for exposing her. The jury in Libby's perjury trial heard a 66-second snippet of one of the deep background interviews given to Washington Post editor Bob Woodward for use in one of his books. They also saw a parade of Pulitzer-prize winning journalists discuss who did and did not leak the information that set off a scandal and ultimately brought Libby to trial. Woodward, who never wrote about Plame, and...

WASHINGTON (AP) -- NBC's Tim Russert got the sort of "Meet the Press" interrogation he usually gives to his guests as attorneys Thursday flashed excerpts of his previous statements on a video monitor and asked him to explain inconsistencies. Russert is the final witness for the prosecution in the perjury trial of former White House aide I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby. The broadcast journalist, who hosts the Sunday network television interview show, found his own scruples questioned during his second day on the witness stand. Russert seemed uncomfortable at times as Libby's attorneys asked him to explain why he willingly told...

WASHINGTON -- A jury that includes four critics of the Bush administration's Iraq policies was seated Monday to try former White House aide "Scooter" Libby on charges of lying about what he told reporters concerning the wife of a prominent war opponent. The jury of nine women and three men was seated after a nearly hourlong court session that was as silent as a professional chess match. Prosecutors and defense attorneys consulted in whispers, then handed papers to the clerk to exercise their 20 unexplained strikes of potential jurors. The only sound was the clerk reading the number of each...

A pattern is emerging at the Lewis Libby trial, now in the middle of its third week in the federal courthouse in Washington. The pattern is this: A witness called by prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald delivers testimony that seems clearly damaging to Libby, strongly suggesting that Libby lied when he testified before prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald’s grand jury in the CIA-leak affair. And then Libby’s lawyers take over, suggesting that the witness’s memory is so selective, or so flawed, or so sketchy as to render his or her testimony useless. Each day, most news reports from the trial focus on the damage...

But at the trial we learned that when Grenier was asked about it during the Fitzgerald investigation, he couldn’t remember whether he had told Libby or not. When he was first interviewed by the FBI, he didn’t recall. “My response at the time was that I didn’t clearly remember,” Grenier testified. Later, before the grand jury, Grenier recounted, “I told them that I may have, but I didn’t recall.” It wasn’t until a year later, when the Libby case was again in the news, that Grenier remembered that he remembered. “I was going over it and over and over in...

There is no holier icon in the church of the First Amendment than the anonymous leak. Ever since columnist Robert Novak published the identity of a CIA officer nearly four years ago, voices of journalism have delivered sermon after sermon about the centrality of leaks not just to journalism but to democracy itself: We need leaks to keep the government honest. In order to encourage leaks, it follows, reporters must be able to guarantee anonymity to their sources. And in order to protect that anonymity, journalists must be excused from the ordinary duties of citizenship, such as testifying in a...

NOBODY knows what is going to happen in the perjury trial of Scooter Libby, the one-time chief of staff to Vice President Cheney. Every day, special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald's team presents evidence that Libby lied to a grand jury. Every day, Libby's defense effectively pokes holes in the prosecution's case. ...snip.... I have no doubt that Fitzgerald gets up in the morning and looks in the mirror and sees a righteous man. But alas, his eyes deceive him, and his mirror shows nothing but Narcissus.

Audio recordings of former White House aide I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby's secret grand jury testimony will be released publicly after they are presented at his trial, the judge at Libby's trial ruled Monday. In a victory for the news media, U.S. District Judge Reggie Walton said he had little choice but to make them public under the law as applied in the federal court system in Washington, D.C, even though he has concerns about releasing the recordings while the case is under way. Libby is charged with perjury, obstruction and lying to the FBI in an indictment that focuses in...

An FBI agent acknowledged Monday that some of her testimony could not be backed up by notes, an admission that attorneys for former White House aide I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby seized on in an effort to undercut perjury and obstruction charges. Agent Deborah Bond testified last week that, in his FBI interview Libby adamantly denied discussing a CIA operative's identity with White House spokesman Ari Fleischer. Under cross-examination Monday, however, Bond conceded that FBI notes contain no record of such a denial. Rather, they say he may have discussed it but couldn't recall. “Adamantly might not be the perfect word,”...

If you believe prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald's case against Scooter Libby, you must also be ready to grasp the "evidence" for catastrophic man-made global warming over the next thousand years. Because in both cases you're looking for a needle in a haystack --- one that is so nanoscopically tiny that only the eye of faith can pick it out. The only way Fitzpatrick can believe his own legal charges is if he is dreadfully naive. (I don't even want to think about the idea that he is acting in bad faith.)