Revelations at the Libby case disprove much of liberal theory of case

Byron York:

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FIRST, we've learned that the accepted version of how it all started seems to be wrong. In that account, Vice President Dick Cheney got things going when he asked for information about possible Iraqi attempts to purchase uranium in Africa. After that request, CIA employee Valerie Plame suggested sending her husband to look into the question - and the agency indeed flew Joseph Wilson to Niger to investigate.

But documents released at trial suggest the CIA was looking for someone to send to Niger before Cheney ever asked the question. It appears it all began with a report from the Defense Intelligence Agency raising the possibility that Niger had agreed to sell uranium to Iraq. The CIA, which was often at odds with DIA, wanted to knock down the report - and the trial documents indicate that Plame (Mrs. Wilson) volunteered her husband for the job the day before Cheney chimed in.

THE trial has also revealed that some of our premier political reporters and government officials have perfectly terribly memories. Judith Miller, formerly of The New York Times, testified that Libby first told her about Valerie Plame at a meeting in Washington on June 23, 2003. But on cross examination, we learned that Miller originally told the grand jury a different story.

Turns out she completely forgot about that meeting - one of the crucial events in the case against Libby - when she first testified, and only corrected her testimony after she found a shopping bag filled with notebooks under her desk at the Times. Looking through them, she found notes from the June 23 conversation and quickly changed her story.

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Robert Grenier, a former top CIA official who told Libby about Valerie Plame, at first testified before the grand jury that he couldn't recall whether he had or not. Then, a year later, he remembered he had. At trial, he told skeptical defense lawyers that he felt his recollection "growing" over time.

"Your memory improves with time?" asked Libby lawyer William Jeffress.

"Not in all cases, no," Grenier allowed.

Even NBC's Tim Russert - the prosecution's star witness - had a few memory problems. He never wavered in his testimony that he did not tell Libby about Valerie Plame, as Libby contends - but Russert seemed a little lost when defense lawyers asked him about things he'd said on the "Imus" radio program and the "Today" show the morning Libby's indictment was announced.

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Rather than a carefully-planned conspiracy, testimony in the trial has revealed a confused and disjointed White House reaction to Joseph Wilson's broadside against the Bush administration.

When Wilson began taking very public shots at the administration's case for war - first anonymously, then by name in a Times op-ed and an appearance on "Meet the Press" - the first reaction in the vice president's office was not to develop an evil plot. It was to ask, "Who is this guy? and "Did we really send him to Africa?"

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There is more between the ...'s. York has done a first rate job of covering the trial. He has done a much better job than those in the media who seem to be rooting for the prosecution. This is a case based on Libby's different recollection of events. What the defense has done is sow doubts about the prosecution's witnesses recollections by doing a pretty effective cross examination. It will be interesting to see the defense witnesses this week.

If one of them is Wilson he will be put to explaining why he told the world that he was sent to Niger because of a request of the Vice President, when that very clearly was not the case. That was an explanation meant to throw off suspicion from the acts of his wife. He can also be examined as a hostile witness and asked about his own "failure of recollection" in his original claim that forgeries tipped him to question the intelligence about Saddam approaching Niger on Yellowcake, when they did not even appear until after his trip. Then there is the fact that his findings on his trip proved instead of disproved what the President had said in his Sate of the Union speech.