February 15, 2007: Columnist: Libby Did Not Testify Because Jury Had Already Heard his Testimony

Columnist Byron York, writing for the conservative publication National Review, explains to readers why neither former White House official Lewis Libby nor Vice President Dick Cheney testified during Libby’s trial on perjury and obstruction charges (see February 13-14, 2007). York says that once the decision was made for Libby not to testify, there was no reason for Cheney to testify. “The vice president would likely have testified about Libby’s state of mind in May, June, and July of 2003, when the Bush administration’s case for war in Iraq was under attack by former ambassador Joseph Wilson,” York writes. “The Libby defense has maintained that he, Libby, was tremendously busy at the time and might well have forgotten about the particulars of how he learned, and then forgot, about the identity of Valerie Plame Wilson. With Libby not testifying, it followed that Cheney wouldn’t either.” York then addresses the decision to keep Libby off the witness stand. For York, the question was not whether the jury needed to hear Libby talk about his role in exposing Valerie Plame Wilson as a CIA official, but whether the jury needed to hear it again, after listening to eight hours of Libby’s grand jury testimony (see February 5, 2007 and February 6, 2007). “[B]y the time Libby had to decide whether to testify,” York writes, “the jury had already heard a lot of Lewis Libby testifying.” It had also heard audio of special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald quizzing Libby. York writes: “Libby’s defenders are betting that jurors took from those recordings an impression not only of the defendant but of the prosecutor. And the impression that Libby’s supporters hope jurors will have is that of a prosecutor trying too hard to find a crime where there was none.” What jurors did not hear during those hours of audio evidence, York notes, was Fitzgerald asking Libby about former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage’s leak of Plame Wilson’s CIA identity (see June 13, 2003). York concludes: “[T]he entirety of Fitzgerald’s grand jury questioning might leave jurors with a more nuanced impression: that of a prosecutor who had received faulty information, or incomplete information, from other witnesses and who looked to Libby—and not those who had omitted or failed to remember key acts during their testimony—as the suspected criminal. The grand jury tapes reveal a prosecutor who had had sand thrown in his eyes—to use Fitzgerald’s famous image—but it had not been thrown by Lewis Libby.” [National Review, 2/15/2007]