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By Jeralyn Merritt, Denver
The cable news airwaves were filled Tuesday with juror No. 9, Denis Collins, discussing how jurors in the trial of I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney's former chief of staff, deliberated and arrived at their verdict of guilty on four of the five counts against him. Libby was convicted of obstruction of justice, making false statements to FBI officials and perjury before the grand jury. He was acquitted of one false statement count.
I had the opportunity to sit through much of the trial in Washington, D.C., covering it as a reporter for my own blog, TalkLeft: the Politics of Crime, as well as for Huffington Post and the Firedoglake blogs.
As a political liberal, I wanted prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald to win. I wanted to see Libby, Dick Cheney and other administration officials held publicly accountable for leaking the identity of CIA agent Valerie Plame Wilson to reporters, ruining her career and smearing her husband, former U.S. Ambassador Joseph Wilson, who had the guts to go public with his charge that the administration had misled the country on the intelligence leading up to the war in Iraq.
As a criminal defense attorney, I wanted Libby's lawyers to win. This was a case dependent on memory and every witness's memory was flawed as to some aspects of events. I was hoping the inconsistencies in their testimony would leave jurors with a reasonable doubt. The jury deliberated 10 days. They were told they could not consider whether Valerie Plame Wilson was a covert agent or whether her employment status was classified.
The task before them was a narrow one. Did Libby lie to investigators and the grand jury about where he first learned of Valerie Wilson's CIA employment and whom he disclosed it to, and did he intend to impede the criminal investigation? Juror No. 9 explained they painstakingly dissected every bit of testimony and exhibit, filling up 34 large pages of post-it notes. They didn't take a straw vote until after their first week of deliberations. There were no holdout jurors. They would have liked to have heard from Cheney, but it didn't bother them that Libby didn't testify, since they heard eight hours of his grand jury testimony. They felt sympathy for him, but they couldn't ignore the evidence in front of them. He lied, he impeded the investigation and he was guilty.
Juror No. 9 said the jury wondered why Libby but not the leaker -- Richard Armitage -- or Karl Rove, among others, had been brought before them. He believed that Libby's lawyer, Ted Wells, may have been correct in saying Libby was a fall guy for the administration. It just didn't excuse Libby's lies.
I agree with the jury's verdict, but I feel cheated.
Having followed the Plame investigation closely since 2003, I believe there was an orchestrated attempt by the White House -- and Cheney in particular -- to discredit Joseph Wilson by alleging his trip to Africa in 2002 to check on intelligence claims that Iraq was attempting to acquire uranium from Niger for use in weapons of mass destruction was the result of nepotism. Cheney's handwritten notes, introduced at trial, plainly asked whether Wilson had been sent on a junket by his wife.
This trial should have been about whether the vice president of the United States -- in an effort to justify going to war by hiding the truth from the American public that there was no intelligence establishing that Iraq was in the process of acquiring materials for weapons of mass destruction -- used Libby and other officials to manipulate the media and cause them to disclose the identity of a classified CIA agent.
Instead, because Libby clammed up, as is his right, and took a bullet for the team, even claiming to the grand jury he forgot the details of his conversations with Cheney, prosecutors weren't able to get to the truth and decide if they had a case against Cheney. As Fitzgerald said when he announced Libby's indictment, Libby had thrown sand in the face of the umpires.
In the end, while Libby's lawyers were unsuccessful in defending their fall guy, they did a heck of a job for the administration.
Jeralyn Merritt is a criminal defense attorney in Denver and blogs at TalkLeft.com and 5280.com.
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