01-24) 04:00 PST Washington -- Lewis "Scooter" Libby was "put through the meat grinder" by the White House shortly after the Iraq war began, scapegoated to conceal that presidential adviser Karl Rove helped disclose an undercover CIA officer's identity, a defense attorney contended Tuesday as Libby's perjury trial began.
In their opening statements, the lawyer, Theodore Wells, and Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald agreed that Vice President Dick Cheney ordered Libby, then his chief of staff, to contact reporters early in the summer of 2003 in an effort to rebut criticism that the administration had selectively used intelligence to justify the invasion of Iraq.
According to Wells, the confidential conversations Libby had with several well-known journalists were not intended to spread the identity of Valerie Wilson, the covert CIA officer. Instead, Libby's lawyer said, he was acting at Cheney's instructions to respond to allegations that the vice president withheld information that would have raised doubts about whether Iraq was trying to develop weapons of mass destruction.
Libby, 56, is accused of five felony charges stemming from a federal investigation into the leak of Wilson's identity to the media. Libby is not charged with the leak itself, nor is anyone else. He faces two counts of making false statements to FBI agents, two counts of perjuring himself before a grand jury and one count of obstructing the investigation, and has pleaded not guilty to all charges.
"How could we reach a point where the chief of staff for the vice president was repeatedly lying to federal investigators?" Fitzgerald asked jurors rhetorically. "That's what this case is all about."
During an hourlong opening statement that started the trial, the prosecutor painted for the jury what he called "a firestorm" inside the White House on the final day of the July 4, 2003, weekend, when a New York Times op-ed piece by Wilson's husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, attacked the administration.
Joseph Wilson, who had been sent to Niger by the CIA to determine whether Iraq was seeking uranium for its nuclear weapons program, said the president and his aides "may have twisted the intelligence" concerning whether Iraq was seeking weapons of mass destruction.
Libby told investigators that he was surprised to learn from NBC's Tim Russert in July 2003 that Joseph Wilson was married to Valerie Wilson, who also is known by her maiden name, Valerie Plame. But Fitzgerald contended that Libby, at Cheney's direction, had been asking people about Joseph Wilson for weeks.
He said Libby's claim to a grand jury that he simply had forgotten what he knew was implausible, because he had passed on Valerie Wilson's name to reporters and then-White House press secretary Ari Fleischer before he ever spoke with Russert.
"You can't learn something startling on Thursday that you're giving out Monday and Tuesday of the same week," Fitzgerald said.
Wells countered that "this is a weak, paper-thin, circumstantial evidence case about he-said, she-said."
He said that Libby gave investigators his "good-faith recollection" and that any mistakes in his memory were innocent. He said Libby did not aggressively push the Joseph Wilson story, did not know that Valerie Wilson worked in a covert role and had no motive to lie to investigators.
According to Wells, when the federal investigation of the leak began in the fall of 2003, Libby was not worried about his job, but was "concerned about ... being scapegoated." Scott McClellan, then White House press secretary, said publicly that Rove was not responsible for any leaks, Wells said, but did not say the same about Libby.
Libby, Wells said, told Cheney he feared "people in the White House are trying to set me up." Wells then showed the jury the text of a note Cheney had jotted that read: "Not going to protect one staffer + sacrifice the guy that was asked to stick his neck in the meat grinder because of the incompetence of others."
Wells said "that one person was Karl Rove. He was viewed as a political genius. ... He had to be protected. The person who was to be sacrificed was Scooter Libby." According to Wells, the vice president tried, unsuccessfully, to persuade White House colleagues to publicly clear Libby's name as the source of the leak.
Valerie Wilson's name first appeared in a July 14 column by Robert Novak. Rove and Richard Armitage, then the deputy secretary of state, have acknowledged being Novak's sources for the story.
Asked about the defense's portrayal, White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said Tuesday, "We are not commenting on an ongoing criminal matter."
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