Posted on 01/29/2007 10:34:34 AM PST by Sub-Driver
Fleischer: Plame came up over lunch
By MATT APUZZO, Associated Press Writer 39 minutes ago
Former White House press secretary Ari Fleischer testified Monday that then-colleague I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby told him over lunch that the wife of a prominent war critic worked at the CIA.
Fleischer said the conversation happened June 7, 2003, days before Libby told investigators he was surprised to learn about the CIA operative from a reporter. That discrepancy is at the heart of Libby's perjury and obstruction trial.
Fleischer, who was the chief White House spokesman for the first 2 1/2 years of President Bush's first term, said Monday that Libby invited him to lunch to discuss Fleischer's planned departure from the White House. He said it was the first time he and Libby had eaten lunch together.
They talked about Fleischer's career plans and their shared interest in the Miami Dolphins football team, Fleischer testified. He can't remember who brought it up but he said the conversation then turned to the growing controversy over former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, who accused the White House of ignoring prewar intelligence on Iraq.
"Ambassador Wilson was sent by his wife," Fleischer recalled Libby saying. "His wife works for the CIA."
Fleischer said Libby also used the woman's name, Valerie Plame, and told him it was "hush hush."
"My sense is that Mr. Libby was telling me this was kind of newsy," Fleischer said.
Fleischer testified under an immunity deal with prosecutors and arrived in court with his attorneys. He sought the deal because he discussed Plame with reporters. Libby's attorneys plan to argue during cross-examination that the immunity deal makes Fleischer's testimony less credible.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
Is this 'throw Libby under the train' day at the trial?
"Plame came up over lunch"
Unfortunate phrasing...sounds like reflux.
or a nooner
Ari might be a real problem for Libby.
Hey Libby was willing to throw Cheney under the train. Payback is hell. Libbys problem is not challenging Fitzgerld on the validity of Plume being covert. Unless she is covert, no law was broken, period! This trial should have been over in 5 minutes!
If that is what happened, Fleischer has a responsibility to tell the truth. That beings said, if convicted, Libby will be pardoned and GW will state the reason he was pardoned is Fitzgerald never charged the actual leaker of Plame, which Fitzgerald was appointed to do.
Let's wait for the cross examinaion.
This whole thing is such a non-story, why is it even going to trial.
This is the "Seinfeld" of scandals, a scandal about nothing.
Ping
If that is so, then I don't understand whats the charge? The judge disavows the law, throws out the rule of the law, so no law could have been possibly broken! Fitzgerald who crux of his argument is that a covert CIA agents name was leaked out is now null and void is it not?
Hmmmm...no documentation.
"If that is so, then I don't understand whats the charge?"
I think that they are attempting obstruction of justice, or perjury. That's a real sham. though.
This is idiotic. I still can't remember what I had for breakfast yesterday, and these people claim to remember who told them what on which day in 2003.
Granted, they are probably smarter than me, but I have my doubts that they are that much smarter.
Why is this important? It certainly does not prove that he was not surprised when he learned it from a reporter. All it proves is that he repeated it to Fleischer.
"Spot the Spook" is a staple of Washington DC lunchtime gossip and has been for generations.
Don't sell yourself short. You'd be amazed how many people in positions of power, especially Washington, have IQs scantly higher than their shoe size.
Fitzgerald is like Kramer... on his fantasy, Merv Griffin set.
whatever happened to "I don't specifically recall?" it worked for Clintonistas all those years.
It says in the article that Fliescher and Libby only had lunch together once and the matter came up over that lunch. Given that Fliescher certainly has a schedule that he can refer to to give him the date of his lunch with Libby, it is not too hard to believe that he can say with confidence which day he heard this from Libby.
Looks like a closed-system perpetual-motion legal machine which has cost the taxpayers million$.
I should really tune this one out; worse than a "Days of Our Lives" serial...
Fleischer begins by explaining the duties of the WH press spokesperson: “talking to the press, both formally and informally” and communicating with them in a variety of ways, ... Fleischer is composed and articulate on the witness stand. He handles questions about the “sixteen words” in the State of the Union address with ease. Through late spring, he was asked about it by the press but told reporters there was other evidence that might have supported the claim that Iraq had sought uranium from Niger. Later it emerged that the information the White House had used “was wrong in its entirety.” http://www.roryoconnor.org/blog/?p=213
What? I thought the 16 words were later found to be true and that Bush and Blair are standing by them. Why would Fleischer say this? Are those the blogger's words or Ari's? They are in quotes, so I am assuming Ari said it. More confusing now...
Wait clarify this for me. The initial charge is lying to the Grand Jury about Plames status. But Plame had no status that is a violation of the law. So outing her is not a crime and never was a crime
So in essence, doesn't this amount to nothing more than taking free samples from a store and being charged with shop lifting?
That is pretty much that. The entire trial is about 3 days of time. He says he learned of Plame on one day, and there is evidence that he knew about her 3 days earlier. That's perjury -- if it was intentional.
Libby's defense is that he was so busy with far more important matters that he didn't get the days right and it was unintentional. The defense will make that argument and try to raise a reasonable doubt in the jury's mind. The prosecution's case is somewhat unimportant because the defense case, because of its nature, could actually simply stipulate that there is a 3 day discrepancy and then proceed to explain it away.
They will try to do that.
Then what is the charge?
Fitzgerald is required to make a charge in his opening statements at the start of this trial.
And no, it does not matter that the investigation did not find any crime in the "outing" of Plame. That truly does not matter. What does matter, and what the charges are, is that an attempt was made to obstruct or deceive the investigation. Regardless of what the investigation eventually found, or didn't find, one cannot obstruct an investigation.
Visualize it as . . . and IRS audit. You are called in for an audit. During the audit, which finds nothing wrong, you get angry and rip a pencil out of the auditors hand, hurl it at him, hitting him in an eye, and flip the desk over. It does not matter that the audit found nothing. You can't do the other things that you did -- and arguing that none of those things would have happened if you had not been called in for the meritless audit is not going to carry any weight.
I am almost sure someone in the position that Ari Fleisher was in, would keep a daily planner. So he would have the date and time of his lunch with Scooter Libby.
This is still a witch hunt.
The article seems to list the charges:
"That discrepancy is at the heart of Libby's perjury and obstruction trial."
Not that I agree.
It could be called a witch hunt. But Fitzgerald knows that. I am sure he sat with his staff of people and discussed the entire matter. They believed Libby lied. They believe it was intentional. The jury may not, but they do. And then know that it had no impact on an investigation that found nothing.
But it is, in their view, perjury. They can persuade themselves that they are referees in a basketball game and there are 15 seconds left to play and one team leads by 30 points, and there, right there in front of them, one player elbows another to the stomach.
No, let's back up. One player didn't elbow another, that's too extreme. One player was "over the back" of another on a meaningless rebound.
Referees are not supposed to care what the score is, how much time is left, or who is playing. They are supposed to call fouls when they see one. They could have let that over the back foul go, but in purest form they are not supposed to.
So the prosecution team made a choice and called a foul.
Shades of Martha Stewart, and she spent time in prison for it.
I'm sure he would have a planner too. But I am still skeptical of the idea that all these people can pinpoint what was said (and in some cases by whom) at particular occasions. They interacted with multiple people aware of the information, and probably more than once.
I'm sure he would have a planner too. But I am still skeptical of the idea that all these people can pinpoint what was said (and in some cases by whom) at particular occasions. They interacted with multiple people aware of the information, and probably more than once.
Furthermore, Fitzgerald knew that no crime was committed.
As I recall, Bob Woodward "outed Plame" before Libby did, and Fitzgerald instructed Woodward to keep quit about it so he could continue his "investigation" of a non-crime.
Fitzgerald's goal is to entrap Bush or Cheney official(s). What going on here is prosecutorial malfeasance.
Only if the lunch was the only time they ever spoke to each other. I'm not buying it; they worked in the same place and I just don't think most people are guaranteed to remember the surroundings of this sort of conversation without any chance of error. We also have to consider that Fleischer was anxious to come up with something definitive to appease Fitzy, who did not want to give him immunity.
I think what it might basically boil down to is something like this:
If Fitz asked Libby in front of the GJ, and FBI agents also asked him:
did you eat oatmeal on June 7th?
And, if Fitz had some testimony from his housekeeper and a Libby cohort who spoke to him while he was eating oatmeal that he had it on June 6th, not June 7th, but Libby said he had it on the 7th, Fitzie would charge Libby with lying under oath and 3 or 4 other counts of obstructing justice.
Am I close to the lilliputian prosecutorial character of Fitzie?
I believe that the correct wording was "uranium from AFRICA", not "uranium from NIGER". Too bad Ari couldn't remember that. Also, Ari was given immunity by Fitz for his testimony.
It is for a jury to decide what weight to put on various testimony. You can be certain Mr. Libby's lawyers will be making just that argument.
That said, this whole case is BS from the git go. The investigative process should have been wrapped up in a day, since there was obviously no crime involved, based on Plames easily ascertainable non-covert status. Fitzgerald just set a lot of perjury traps, which is reprehensible.
That said, Libby was stupid to step into one.
Not saying you're wrong, but what exactly have you seen that makes you think Libby has thrown Cheney under the train?
I haven't seen anything that would indicate that --nor that Cheney had been disloyal to Libby, as someone on another thread claimed.
As to the question of whether this discrepancy of Libby's memory --vs. other persons' memories-- is worth prosecuting? No, of course it is NOT.
Fitzgerald's prosecution of Libby is blatant prosecutorial indiscretion.
It's Sandy Burglar who should be sweating over the possibility of 30 years in prison, not Libby.
Fitzgerald still has to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that Libby deliberately lied to the Feds. Frankly, having Fleischer testify doesn't prove that one way or the other. Just because he makes a statement over lunch, it doesn't mean he remembered that statement months later, especially since the lunch consisted of other topics as well. Just because I know a fact, doesn't mean I remember when or who I told it to in a casual lunch conversation. Fitzgerald is grasping at straws.
On cross, he says he's not "absolutely certain" about the conversation.
On cross it is pointed out that he said the CIA memo Bartlett commented on in AF 1 mentioned Wilson but the memo doesn't mention his name at all.
Fleischer also took the call from Novak (who had the details from Armitage) just before this lunch--and he may very well have confused who told him what.He concedes he mispronounced Plame's name before the gj and said he usually does that when the 1st time he's seen a name is in writing.
Finally he testified he told a gaggle of reporters about Plame on July 11--Gregory and Dickerson of Slate among them, but Dickerson says Fleischer never mentioned Plame or Mrs. Wilson and when asked "If Cheney didn't send Wilson, who did?" Fleischer told him to ask the CIA.
A thin reed for the prosecution to rely on and the cross isn't over yet.
Right, but why are the 16 words even relevant to this trial? Why isn't defense counsel jumping up with, "Objection, relevancy, your Honor"? It seems to be more negative, anti-war, juror-manipulating, Bush-bashing allowed to creep in.
Of course, it opens the door for the defense to possibly show Wilson lied about his findings regarding the 16 words, thereby justifying the WH's attempts to correct the record in the hopes of possibly soliciting some sympathy from the jury. But, again, neither are relevant to the seemingly, very limited charges in this case so I am surprised that testimony was allowed.
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