Eric Engberg On The Lessons Of The Libby Affair
QUESTION #1 – Why did Vice President Cheney order Scooter Libby to conduct the smear campaign against the Wilsons when he could have easily picked up the phone and called a few Administration-friendly reporters, like Bob Novak and Judy Miller, and do the leaking himself?
ANSWER – Cheney knew he needed what in intelligence work is called a "cutout," because he understood perfectly well that revealing the identity of a CIA undercover agent was morally wrong and almost certainly illegal. The juror who said Scooter was a "fall guy" had it right. But doesn't that make Cheney both a shameless manipulator and a terrible coward?
The premeditated nature of the attack on Joe Wilson can be assessed further by the fact that Libby, given Cheney's direction, did not peddle the Plame outing to an obvious Administration fugleman such as Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity. The carefully conceived plot called for a Wilson-Plame revelation that looked like real journalism, not propaganda.
QUESTION #2 – Is there any group that stands lower in public esteem than professional journalists?
ANSWER – Yes, defense lawyers for indicted government officials. Attempts by Scooter's legal beagles to belittle the memories and honesty of journalists such as Tim Russert and Matt Cooper to influence the jury blew up in their faces. But the fact that reporters forget dates, lose notebooks and can't decipher their own notes, all well established by the trial testimony, is not going to put any kind of sheen on the Washington press. They looked pathetic, as Cheney might say, "Big time."
QUESTION #3 – Wasn't Libby really just a patriotic official trying to advance his government's interests?
ANSWER – Myriad ways to do that were available to him without resorting to perjury. As CBS law analyst Andrew Cohen pointed out, he could have said he forgot who told him about Plame's CIA connection. As a last resort he could have exercised his Fifth Amendment rights and refused to talk at all. He is a lawyer and knows what obstruction of justice is. He decided to do it.
Keep in mind that what he did also had real victims beyond Plame and Wilson. Libby was convicted of telling the FBI and a grand jury that NBC's Russert was the source of his information that Plame was a CIA agent. That lie carried the potential of painting a prosecutorial bulls eye on the back of Russert, who was an innocent bystander. Outside the Beltway, there is a technical phrase for this type of lie: Back stabbing. Why would Scooter do such a thing? Because the press has a tradition of refusing to cooperate with leak investigations and he assumed that Russert would refuse to talk to the FBI or the prosecutor, risking time in jail for contempt. In short, Scooter is a weasel.
QUESTION #4 – Why was Cheney, who is paid for being the second ranking official in the government and who, we are led to believe, is often running said government, messing around in press spin and character assassination?
ANSWER – Cheney comes across in the testimony as a grudge-bearing, Queegishly obsessive ("Who ate those strawberries?") character. So, thanks to all you Beltway political pundits (and I was one of them) who applauded Bush for naming him to the ticket in 2000 on the grounds that he would provide a mature, sensible voice in an otherwise inexperienced administration.
I'm guessing he also sought to terrify the CIA into believing that he was willing to destroy its agents one at a time if anyone in the agency dissed Bush policies.
QUESTION #5 – Doesn't this case demonstrate, as many anti-Bush bloggers long argued, that the MSM establishment was captured by the Administration in the early phases of the Iraq war and consequently failed in its responsibility to provide readers with an honest explanation of what the government was doing?
ANSWER – No, just the opposite. Scooter was ordered by Cheney to spread the story that Joe Wilson was on a junket arranged by his wife when he traveled to Africa in search of information about Iraqi weapons programs. So Scooter fed this tale to NY Times reporter Judy Miller. Miller pitched the story to her editors, who declined to pursue such an obvious smear. Anyone with newsroom experience can almost hear the Times editor in question saying, "A trip to Niger, Africa -- not to be confused with Cancun -- was a junket? Come on, Judy, get serious." That's what editors are paid to do, evaluate the information coming in over the transom and deep-sixing self-serving spin and out-and-out garbage.
QUESTION #6 – Hasn't prosecutor Fitzgerald's zeal in going after testimony and notes from reporters damaged our First Amendment freedoms by forever destroying source-journalist confidential agreements?
ANSWER – No. Remember that Fitz is a FEDERAL prosecutor, and the tactics he used would not be available to state and local prosecutors in most states because of the existence of state reporter shield laws. Furthermore, the U.S. Department of Justice's guidelines on subpoenaing journalists, which were strongly endorsed by Fitzgerald after the trial, permit the questioning of journalists only when there is no other way to gather evidence of a crime.
Reporters were forced to testify in this matter because they were the primary witnesses to a possible national security violation. It is of course possible that whistle-blowers will be less likely to talk to the press because they fear a reporter cannot protect their identity. But I would argue that the totality of this case has made it clear to all that high government officials are now so adept and ruthless at turning confidentiality to their advantage as they spin and smear that society will benefit if there is a great deal less of this type of one-sided transaction.