The Press Gangbang the Press Secretary

[DudeAsInCool]

Cheney was heavily involved - see the video

[DudeAsInCool]

Slate is doing gavel to gavel coverage of the Libby trial and you can read the daily updates right HERE

[DudeAsInCool]

Vice President Cheney's former public affairs director testified this morning that I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby directed her to ask the CIA which journalists were working on stories about a CIA-sponsored trip to Africa, then personally telephoned at least one of them in an attempt to influence the broadcast.

Cathie Martin's testimony, on the third morning of Libby's perjury trial, again made clear that Libby was aggressively involved in the effort to gather information about former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, who went to the African nation of Niger at the CIA's request to determine whether Iraq was seeking nuclear material there. Wilson later publicly accused the administration of trying to justify the Iraq invasion by twisting his conclusions that Iraq had not tried to buy uranium from Niger.

Martin's testimony also showed how deeply Cheney himself was enmeshed in the effort in the early summer of 2003 to deflect blame from his office about Wilson's trip --and to discredit Wilson.

Read more at the Washington Post

[DudeAsInCool]

Jon Stewart interviews former White House Press Secretary Scott McClelland on the Libby trial - watch it here :)

[DudeAsInCool]

Jan. 26, 2007 - White House anxiety is mounting over the prospect that top officials—including deputy chief of staff Karl Rove and counselor Dan Bartlett-may be forced to provide potentially awkward testimony in the perjury and obstruction trial of Lewis (Scooter) Libby.

Both Rove and Bartlett have already received trial subpoenas from Libby’s defense lawyers, according to lawyers close to the case who asked not to be identified talking about sensitive matters. While that is no guarantee they will be called, the odds increased this week after Libby’s lawyer, Ted Wells, laid out a defense resting on the idea that his client, Vice President Dick Cheney’s former chief of staff, had been made a “scapegoat” to protect Rove. Cheney is expected to provide the most crucial testimony to back up Wells’s assertion, one of the lawyers close to the case said

Read more at Newsweek

[DudeAsInCool]

WASHINGTON, Jan. 29 — The former White House spokesman Ari Fleischer today contradicted the account of I. Lewis Libby Jr., Vice President Dick Cheney’s former chief of staff, on when Mr. Libby first learned the identity of a C.I.A. agent.

Mr. Fleischer, testifying in Mr. Libby’s trial under a grant of immunity, said Mr. Libby told him over lunch on July 7, 2003, that the wife of a critic of President Bush’s Iraq policy worked for the Central Intelligence Agency. That is three days before he told a grand jury that he first learned her name.

“This is hush-hush,” Mr. Fleischer recalled Mr. Libby as saying in effect. “This is on the Q.T. Not many people know about this.”

Read more at The Washington Post

[DudeAsInCool]

WASHINGTON - Journalists will take center stage at the CIA leak trial as Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald begins calling reporters as witnesses.

Fitzgerald said Judith Miller was to take the stand Tuesday, the first time the former New York Times reporter has testified publicly against the man she went to jail to protect as a source....

...Miller spent 85 days in jail for refusing to cooperate with Fitzgerald's investigating and reveal her conversations with Libby. She retired from the Times in November 2005, declaring that she had to leave because she had "become the news."

Read More

[DudeAsInCool]

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Former New York Times reporter Judith Miller testified Tuesday that former vice presidential aide I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby first discussed a CIA operative with her weeks before he told investigators he believed he first heard it from another reporter.

Miller spent 85 days in jail for refusing to cooperate with Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald's investigation into who leaked the CIA operative's identity to reporters. She had refused to disclose conversations she had with Libby.

Read more

Miller: Libby told me three times that war critic's wife worked for CIA

Miller described three meetings with Libby — including two before the time that the former White House aide said that he first learned about Plame from another journalist

Read More

Libby is toast

[DudeAsInCool]

John Stewart sums up the case in an amusing manner - despite some side track humor, he gets to the heart of the issue. Watch It Here

[DudeAsInCool]

One of the FBI agents who interviewed I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby during the CIA leak investigation testified yesterday that the vice president's then-chief of staff did not acknowledge disclosing the identity of undercover CIA officer Valerie Plame to reporters, asserting that he was surprised when another journalist later told him about her.

FBI agent Deborah S. Bond also testified that Libby said that, while he was preparing to be interviewed by investigators in the fall of 2003, he came across a handwritten note he had made during a phone conversation with Vice President Cheney. The note made it clear that, shortly before June 12, 2003, Cheney had told Libby that Plame worked at the CIA's counterproliferation division and was married to an outspoken critic of the Iraq war.

Read More

[DudeAsInCool]

Vice President's Shadow Hangs Over Trial

Testimony Points Out Cheney's Role in Trying to Dampen Joseph Wilson's Criticism

Vice President Cheney's press officer, Cathie Martin, approached his chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, on Air Force Two on July 12, 2003, to ask how she should respond to journalists' questions about Joseph C. Wilson IV. Libby looked over one of the reporters' questions and told Martin: "Well, let me go talk to the boss and I'll be back."

On Libby's return, Martin testified in federal court last week, he brought a card with detailed replies dictated by Cheney, including a highly partisan, incomplete summary of Wilson's investigation into Iraq's suspected weapons of mass destruction program.

Libby subsequently called a reporter, read him the statement, and said -- according to the reporter -- he had "heard" that Wilson's investigation was instigated by his wife, an employee at the CIA, later identified as Valerie Plame. The reporter, Matthew Cooper of Time magazine, was one of five people with whom Libby discussed Plame's CIA status during those critical weeks that summer.

After seven days of such courtroom testimony, the unanswered question hanging over Libby's trial is, did the vice president's former chief of staff decide to leak that disparaging information on his own?

No evidence has emerged that Cheney told him to do it. But Cheney's dictated reply is one of many signs to emerge at the trial of the vice president's unusual attentiveness to the controvery and his desire to blunt it. His efforts included the extraordinary disclosure of classified information, including one-sided synopses of Wilson's report and a 2002 intelligence estimate on Iraq.

Read more at The Washington Post

[DudeAsInCool]

In his ending argument at the Libby Trial, the prosecutor once again aimed his guns at Cheney:

Last week, Scooter Libby and his defense team decided not to call Vice President Dick Cheney to the witness stand. Today, prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald brought him in anyway. "Let's talk straight," he said, sounding like John McCain. "There is a cloud over the vice president." One of the unanswered questions of the Libby trial is whether, as Cheney's aide, Scooter lied and obstructed justice to protect his boss from political embarrassment or legal jeopardy. In his closing argument, Fitzgerald said that it's Libby's fault those questions linger: "That cloud remains because the defendant lied about evidence and obstructed justice."

The government built its case and today's closing argument around what Fizgerald referred to as "the big slide," a graphic displayed on courtroom screens with a picture of Libby at the center. Surrounding the defendant was a halo (or the opposite) of yellow arrows, pointing out to eight boxes representing the people with whom Libby talked about undercover CIA officer Valerie Plame. A picture of Cheney in the upper left-hand corner stood for the first time Libby heard about Valerie Plame. (Libby disclosed that disclosure to the grand jury). The other boxes represented the journalists and government officials who have contradicted Libby's testimony about what happened during June and July 2003, the period of time that's the focus of the trial.

Read more at Slate

[DudeAsInCool]

Libby Found Guilty in CIA Leak Trial

WASHINGTON (AP) - Former White House aide I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby was convicted Tuesday of obstruction, perjury and lying to the FBI in an investigation into the leak of a CIA operative's identity.

Libby, the former chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney, was accused of lying and obstructing the investigation into the 2003 leak of CIA operative Valerie Plame's identity to reporters.

He was acquitted of one count of lying to the FBI.

Read More

[DudeAsInCool]

Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the House: Today's guilty verdicts are not solely about the acts of one individual.

This trial provided a troubling picture of the inner workings of the Bush Administration. The testimony unmistakably revealed – at the highest levels of the Bush Administration – a callous disregard in handling sensitive national security information and a disposition to smear critics of the war in Iraq.

Source

Reid: "Bush Must Pledge Not To Pardon Libby"…Juror: ‘Where’s Rove Where Are The Other Guys?…Libby Was The Fall Guy’…Primary Thing That Convinced Us Was The Alleged Conversation With Russert’...Bush ‘Saddened’ For Scooter Libby And His Family…Libby’s Lawyers Want Retrial...Fitzgerald: ‘I Do Not Expect To File Any Further Charges'…

Huffington Post

Bush Spokesman Dana Perino: Perino also dismissed sharp criticism from the top opposition Democrat in the Senate, Majority Leader Harry Reid, who released a statement moments after the verdict welcoming the jury's findings and arguing against a pardon.

"It's about time someone in the Bush Administration has been held accountable for the campaign to manipulate intelligence and discredit war critics," Reid said.

"If the Democrats choose to use anything for personal or political gain, I wouldn't be surprised," Perino shot back.

Source: Breitbart

Duh...and why shouldn't they?

[DudeAsInCool]

Juror Explains Libby Verdict: They Felt He Was 'Fall Guy'

NEW YORK A spokesman for the jury that convicted "Scooter" Lewis of four counts today of perjury and obstruction of justice today in a federal courtroom told reporters immediately afterward that many felt sympathy for Libby and believed he was only the "fall guy."

Denis Collins said, "We asked ourselves, what is HE doing here? Where is Rove and all these other guys....He was the fall guy."

He said they believed that Vice President Cheney did "ask him to talk to reporters."

He said, "some jurors said at one point, 'We wish we weren't judging Libby...this sucks."

Asked about Vice President Cheney not testifying, he said, "Having Cheney testifying would have been interesting." And when the defense opened the trial by suggesting that Libby was scapegoated by the White House, "I thought we might get to see President Bush here."

Source

[DudeAsInCool]

With the jury's verdict Tuesday — finding Libby guilty on four counts, including perjury and obstruction of justice, and not guilty on one count of making false statements to the FBI — Cheney's critics, and even some of his supporters, said the vice president had been diminished.

"The trial has been death by 1,000 cuts for Cheney," said Scott Reed, a Republican strategist. "It's hurt him inside the administration, it's hurt him with the Congress and it's hurt his stature around the world because it has shown a lot of the inner workings of the White House. It peeled the bark right off the way they operate."

Source

[DudeAsInCool]

The Huffington Post: What The Jury Thought/Day By Day Deliberations

Deliberations in the case of the United States vs. I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby in District Court for the District of Columbia are ready to commence, when one of the jurors offers an unsolicited statement regarding the solemn task before us.

"I think they're lying. Every one of them."

Read More

Fascinating stuff. This was one smart jury.

[slum_goddess]

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! i hope libby rots after he gets constantly assfucked and beaten up by everyone in wherever he's going.

[Kooperman]

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! i hope libby rots after he gets constantly assfucked and beaten up by everyone in wherever he's going.

Since he's going to be pardoned after the 2008 election, he'll be going straight back to the loving arms of the Republican party....you're right, he's in grave danger of being a rode-tested Scooter.

[slum_goddess]

Since he's going to be pardoned after the 2008 election, he'll be going straight back to the loving arms of the Republican party

are you sure about this? i'm very much outta the political loop and dig it that way.

[DudeAsInCool]

are you sure about this? i'm very much outta the political loop and dig it that way.

a pardon is possible. i wouldnt put it past bush

as an atty, libbby worked to get someone a pardon successfully when clinton was president.

[slum_goddess]

AAARRRRRGGGGHHHHHHHH! CAN YOU HEAR ME SCREAMING?

[DudeAsInCool]

‘Purely Political Motives’ in Outing, Ex-Agent Says

WASHINGTON, March 16 — Valerie Wilson finally spoke Friday, after almost four years at the silent center of a political scandal that touched Washington’s most rarefied circles of government and news media.

...“My name and identity were carelessly and recklessly abused by senior government officials in both the White House and the State Department,” Ms. Wilson testified before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform in a hearing room packed with reporters, photographers and spectators.

..She said the security breach might have endangered agency officials but also “jeopardized and even destroyed entire networks of foreign agents, who in turn risk their own lives and those of their families to provide the United States with needed intelligence. Lives are literally at stake.”

Ms. Wilson said she had long been aware that her identity could be disclosed by foreign governments. “It was a terrible irony that administration officials were the ones who destroyed my cover,” she said, and did so “from purely political motives.”

Read more at the NYTimes

[slum_goddess]

and about five, six hours ago, there were over 1600 articles on the Plame thing on google news.

FINALLY!

[DudeAsInCool]

Fitzgerald Again Points to Cheney

Special counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald has made it clearer than ever that he was hot on the trail of a coordinated campaign to out CIA agent Valerie Plame until that line of investigation was cut off by the repeated lies from Vice President Cheney's former chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby.

Libby was convicted in February of perjury and obstruction of justice. Fitzgerald filed a memo on Friday asking U.S. District Judge Reggie B. Walton, who will sentence Libby next week, to put him in prison for at least two and a half years.

Read more at the Washington Post