Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney's former chief of staff, faces trial in January for lying to FBI agents and a federal grand jury about how he learned and what he subsequently told reporters about then-CIA officer Valerie Plame in 2003.
The crux of Libby's defense will be that he was too preoccupied with national security "matters of life and death" and that he could have easily confused "snippets of conversations" he had with reporters from Time magazine, NBC and the New York Times.
The court filing confirms that Libby's lawyers want to try to force a jury into deciding whose memories of those conversations are accurate -- Libby's or the three reporters.
But the defense team will have to convince U.S. District Judge Reggie B. Walton, who in a hearing earlier this year voiced skepticism about the relevance of testimony about memories.
Plame's identity as a CIA officer was revealed in a July 14, 2003, article by syndicated columnist Robert Novak. At the time, Plame's job as an operations officer for the spy agency was classified information.
Novak's column appeared eight days after Plame's husband, former U.S. Ambassador Joseph Wilson alleged in an opinion piece in The New York Times that the Bush administration had twisted prewar intelligence on Iraq to justify going to war.
In their court filing, Libby's lawyers cited studies -- including a recent survey of District of Columbia jurors -- that they said show the misconceptions jurors have about the reliability of witnesses' recollections.
They said Bjork can explain that contrary to what most jurors think, "memory does not function like a tape recorder, with memories recorded, stored and played back verbatim."
Sounds like a job for Hillary "I Do Not Recall" Clinton.
Is this still going on?
This supposed investigation is a multimillion dollar hoax. Plame was outed by the CIA itself. A reporter calls in, asks if she's CIA, they say "yes". If you are undercover, they don't give you up to anyone calling in who might like to know.
If they give you up to anyone calling in to ask, you aren't undercover.
So, what is Fitz doing, investigating something he already knows the answer to?
Sweet Land of Goshen? Aren't we paying Fitzgerald to exercise a modicum of common sense? Do special prosecutors take an oath to leave their common sense in the parking lot? Of course different people will remember the same event differently. Ever discuss your sister's sixteenth birthday party with her? I remember discussing high school graduation with someone else who graduated on the same day. You'd think we were talking about entirely different schools and years.