Libby and the Wall Street Journal

Opinion Journal:

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Mr. Libby wasn't a source for our editorial, which quoted from the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate concerning the Africa-uranium issue. But Mr. Fitzgerald alleges in a court filing that Mr. Libby played a role in our getting the information, which in turn shows that "notwithstanding other pressing government business, [Libby] was heavily focused on shaping media coverage of the controversy concerning Iraqi efforts to obtain uranium from Niger."

The prosecutor comes close here to suggesting that senior government officials have no right to fight back against critics who make false allegations. To the extent our editorial is germane to this trial, in fact, it's because it puts Mr. Libby's actions into a broadly defensible context that Mr. Fitzgerald refuses to acknowledge.

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Regarding our editorial, Mr. Fitzgerald does at least note that he "will not contend that the defendant's actions in this regard were criminal or otherwise unauthorized." But he also seems to imply that those actions suggest a pattern of malfeasance and a motive for the perjury and obstruction he alleges. Yet Mr. Fitzgerald has not indicted Mr. Libby, or anyone else, for leaking the CIA identity of Mr. Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame--which was his original mandate from the Justice Department. His actual charge of obstruction comes down to the fact that Mr. Libby and several reporters have different recollections of their conversations.

All of this matters because it suggests that Mr. Fitzgerald is scrambling even now to explain why a seasoned attorney such as Mr. Libby would lie to a grand jury. The prosecutor's original indictment doesn't mention a motive. And his mention of our editorial suggests he's now trying to invent a motive out of Mr. Libby's attempt to defend the White House from Mr. Wilson's manifestly false allegations at the onset of a Presidential election campaign. (Mr. Wilson joined the Kerry campaign until he was dropped after the official probes destroyed his credibility.)

There is all the difference in the world between seeking to respond to the substance of Mr. Wilson's charges, as Mr. Libby did, and taking revenge on him by blowing his wife's cover, which was the motive originally hypothesized by Bush critics for the Plame exposure. The more of Mr. Fitzgerald's case that becomes public, the more it looks like he has made the terrible mistake for a prosecutor of taking Joe Wilson's side in what was essentially a political fight.

Indeed. If there were justice at stake here instead of a political fight, Joe Wilson would be in the dock and not Libby. He made false and misleading charges to under cut the President and support for the war in Iraq after his side had lost the policy debate. Now Wilson's side is saying it was criminal for the administration to get the truth out about his false charges.