Before February 28, 2006: Libby Team Retains Memory Expert as Consultant

Lewis Libby’s legal team hires well-known memory expert Daniel L. Schacter as a consultant. Schacter is a psychology professor at Harvard University, and has written books on the subject of memory loss. In one of his books, Schacter wrote that if we are distracted as an event unfolds, “we may later have great difficulty remembering the details of what happened.” It is easy, Schacter has written, to “unwittingly create mistaken—though strongly held—beliefs about the past.” A central tenet of Libby’s defense strategy is to assert that Libby’s repeated falsehoods to the FBI (see October 14, 2003 and November 26, 2003) and the grand jury (see March 5, 2004 and March 24, 2004) were the result of memory problems and not deliberate lies (see January 31, 2006). According to one of Libby’s lawyers, during his hectic days handling sensitive national security matters, “it is understandable that he may have forgotten or misremembered relatively less significant events. Such relatively less important events include alleged snippets of conversations about [outed CIA agent] Valerie Plame Wilson’s employment status.” [MSNBC, 2/28/2006]