Notes and recollections at the Libby trial

Byron York:

Two of the five felony counts in the perjury and obstruction of justice case against Lewis Libby, the former chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney, are based entirely on a single phone conversation Libby had with Matthew Cooper, then a White House correspondent for Time magazine, on July 12, 2003. In federal court in Washington Wednesday, CIA leak prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald revealed his documentary evidence to support those charges — one count of perjury and one count of making false statements — and the evidence was this:

had somethine and about the wilson thing and not sure if it’s ever

That brief passage, reproduced here exactly as it was written, is a portion of Cooper’s hastily typed notes from the July 12 conversation. It apparently describes something that was said between Cooper and Libby that may, or may not, have touched on the question of whether Libby leaked to Cooper the information that former ambassador Joseph Wilson’s wife played a role in the decision to send him to Niger to investigate part of the administration’s case for war in Iraq.

On the witness stand, three and a half years after typing those words, Cooper testified that he didn’t quite know what they meant. But he said he remembered clearly what was said about Wilson’s wife, former CIA employee Valerie Plame Wilson. After talking about the case for war and the controversy over the “16 words” in President Bush’s 2003 State of the Union address, Cooper testified, he asked Libby what he knew about Mrs. Wilson. “Toward the end of the conversation, I asked what he had heard about Wilson’s wife being involved in sending him to Niger,” Cooper told the court. “He said words to the effect of, ‘Yeah, I’ve heard that, too.’”

That was the extent of their conversation about Wilson’s wife, Cooper testified as he was guided through his story by prosecutor Fitzgerald.

...

This seems to be extraordinarily thin evidence for two counts of a Federal case. Here we have a witness that cannot even remember what his notes meant that were suppose to memorialize the conversation, but he has 100 percent recall on a few words of the conversation that were not recorded at all? The incoherence of the "logic" and theory of the case is striking.