What Role Did A Journalist-Juror Play In Convicting Scooter Libby? :: Political News and commentaries

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March 6, 2007

What Role Did A Journalist-Juror Play In Convicting Scooter Libby?

CNN broadcast that Libby trial juror Denis Collins said that during deliberations there was a certain amount of sympathy towards Libby, that they asked themselves, "Where's Rove?" I can't help but ask what in the hell Rove has to do with Scooter Libby and if Collins and other members of the jury had no political agenda, why bring up Rove?

Who am I to question the decision of the 12 make that 11 competent (?) and unbiased (?) jurors who convicted Scooter Libby of four charges of perjury, obstruction of justice, and making a false statement? However, I do have to admit to being a little curious about a journalist that has published at the Washington Post being on the jury in the first place, and then coming out to make a press statement saying the jury believed that Libby was "tasked by Vice President Dick Cheney to talk to reporters about Valerie Plame and her husband, former Ambassador Joe Wilson." But there's much more to the story than that.

As John Gibson explained in his program on Fox News, Joe Wilson wrote a piece for The New York Times implying the vice president sent him on a mission to Africa and then ignored his advice. In the vice president's office the question was: Who is this guy? Why is he saying we sent him, and as a matter of fact who did? Gibson continued with:

Let me quote from an Associated Press report from the trial, dated January 24, 2007, when former CIA Iraq mission manager Robert L. Grenier appeared as a government witness in the trial of Libby. The report reads: Grenier testified he told Libby that the idea of sending ex-Ambassador Joseph Wilson to Niger was the brainchild of Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, who worked in the CIA office that sent him in 2002.

Now, Libby was informed who sent Wilson to Africa. He certainly knew the vice president's office didn't because, well, because he would know. He was the V.P.'s chief of staff.

So the vice president and Libby wanted the press to know because they were getting pointed questions about why did you send this guy if you weren't going to pay attention to his report. And they found out that his wife had sent him. They wanted people to know. Problem was, she was a covert spook, at least technically.

So if you are the vice president or his assistant, can you out the spook if the spook is pulling strings behind your back to make you look bad? Evidently not.

Personally, I'm glad they did. There was a cabal inside the CIA working against the president's policy and they wanted to hide behind their secret status while they did what was essentially an anti-war political hitjob.

This is bad. It is the bad thing at the bottom of this whole episode. Valerie Plame knew what she was doing when she sent her husband. She knew he would never come back with an endorsement for the war. He says in his own book he didn't even believe in deposing Saddam back in the '91 war.

So why would Cheney send an anti-war activist to investigate a key fact in the decision to go to war? Answer: He wouldn't. And the person who did was trying to sabotage the president.

That is the real story behind this entire saga.

Collins insisted that no political agenda emerged among the jurors.

As Gibson notes in his comments, Scooter Libby is going to jail for not remembering who he told what. He didn't lie, the problem is that he didn't remember right, and that is a federal crime, of course, if you happen to be speaking to a FBI agent when your memory fails.

However at the same time, the same Justice Department has taken the case of Sandy Berger - a high government official who lied, stole classified documents, and then destroyed those documents, and he's walking around free as a bird. They won't even ask him to take a lie detector test to determine if he lied more than they already know. Apparently the difference is that Berger is a Democrat and was fortunate enough to not be tried with a journalist from the Washington Post on the jury with an agenda that runs counter to his own.

A couple of final points ... As James Taranto said today at Opinion Journal, the Libby trial was a political show , and partisans of Joe Wilson will use the guilty verdict to declare vindication. But along the way we learned that virtually all the claims Wilson and his supporters made were false:

Libby stands convicted of lying in the course of Patrick Fitzgerald's investigation of the Valerie Plame kerfuffle--but that investigation was undertaken on the basis of a tissue of lies. When Fitzgerald began the case, in 2003, no one had committed any crime in connection with the kerfuffle, and that was fairly easy to ascertain, given that Plame was not a covert agent and Armitage had already owned up to the so-called leak. Fitzgerald looks like an overzealous prosecutor, one who was more interested in getting a scalp than in getting to the truth of the matter.

Of course, Libby could have avoided indictment and conviction if he had simply said "I don't remember" a lot more during the course of the investigation. Therein lies a lesson for witnesses in future such investigations--which may make it harder for prosecutors to do their jobs when pursuing actual crimes.

Posted by Richard at March 6, 2007 6:16 PM

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