In CIA leak trial, Libby found guilty

At an already difficult time for the Bush administration, the felony conviction of a former top aide to Vice President Cheney has cast a pall over the White House.

I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Mr. Cheney's onetime chief of staff, was convicted Tuesday on four of the five counts he faced involving perjury, obstruction of justice, and lying to the FBI during a federal investigation into the suspected leak of a covert CIA agent's identity.

Whether that CIA employee, Valerie Plame, was in fact a covert operative at the time her identity was publicly revealed in a 2003 column by Robert Novak remains a matter of dispute. Ms. Plame and her husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, believe it was and are suing Libby, Cheney, and presidential aide Karl Rove in civil court.

On the criminal counts, Mr. Libby faces up to 25 years in prison, and will be sentenced on June 5. However, the former official is expected to receive a shorter sentence, under federal sentencing guidelines, and will not be required to report to prison pending further legal action. Libby's legal team is requesting a new trial by April 13, and if denied, will appeal Tuesday's verdict.

The guilty verdicts, which were announced in the 10th day of jury deliberations, came as yet another blow to a White House struggling to turn around the central project of its six-year tenure, the Iraq war. On news websites Tuesday afternoon, the headline on Libby appeared near other stories on dozens of Shiite pilgrims killed Tuesday in Iraq.

Though the Libby trial centered on whether the aide had committed perjury and obstruction of justice during a federal investigation, the Iraq war – and the role of the vice president's office in defending the Bush administration's actions in it – provided the backdrop.

The Plame investigation sprang from a 16-word sentence in President Bush's 2003 State of the Union address, in which he stated that Iraq was attempting to purchase uranium from Africa. In July 2003, Ambassador Wilson wrote a column stating that he had found no evidence of such Iraqi attempts and accused the Bush administration of twisting intelligence to justify going to war in Iraq.

According to the argument laid out against Libby by special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald, Cheney's office – and Libby in particular – swung into action to discredit Wilson. Libby's defense team argued that the senior aide did not deliberately make false statements under oath, but rather was a very busy man who could not be expected to remember everything he had said and to whom and when.

After the trial, jurors speaking for the cameras made clear that they believed the Wilson matter and his harsh criticism of the Iraq war were a central concern in Cheney's office and that Libby's claims of memory problems were not credible. Still, one juror said he and his fellow jurors agreed with the defense argument that Libby had been hung out to dry by Mr. Rove and other more senior officials.

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