' Verdict in Libby perjury trial leaves Cheney exposed
By Sheryl Gay Stolberg
Wednesday, March 7, 2007
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WASHINGTON: In legal terms, the jury has spoken in the Libby case.
In political terms, Vice President Dick Cheney is still awaiting a judgment.
For many weeks, Washington watched, transfixed, as the trial of I. Lewis Libby Jr. cast Cheney, his former boss, in the role of puppeteer, pulling the strings in a covert public relations campaign to defend the administration's case for war in Iraq and discredit a critic.
"There is a cloud over the vice president," the prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald, told the jury in summing up the case last month.
Cheney was not charged in the case, cooperated with the investigation and expressed a willingness to testify if called, though he never was. Yet he was a central figure throughout, aggressively fighting back against suggestions that he and President George W. Bush had taken the country to war on the basis of flawed intelligence, showing himself to be keenly sensitive to how he was portrayed in the press, and backing Libby to the end.
With the jury's verdict Tuesday — finding Libby guilty on four counts, including perjury and obstruction of justice, and not guilty on one count of making false statements to the FBI — Cheney's critics, and even some of his supporters, said the vice president had been diminished.
"The trial has been death by 1,000 cuts for Cheney," said Scott Reed, a Republican strategist. "It's hurt him inside the administration, it's hurt him with the Congress and it's hurt his stature around the world because it has shown a lot of the inner workings of the White House. It peeled the bark right off the way they operate."
The legal question in the case was whether Libby lied to investigators and prosecutors looking into the leak of the name of a CIA operative, Valerie Plame Wilson, whose husband, the former ambassador Joseph Wilson 4th, wrote an Op-Ed article in The New York Times accusing the White House of distorting prewar intelligence. Cheney scrawled notes on a copy of the article, asking, "Did his wife send him on a junket?"
Now Cheney faces a civil suit from Joseph Wilson.
The political question was whether Libby, the vice president's former chief of staff, was "the fall guy" for his boss, in the words of Senator Charles Schumer, Democrat of New York. Though the defense introduced a note from Cheney worrying that Libby was being sacrificed to protect other White House officials, some say the vice president bears responsibility for the fate of his former aide, known as Scooter, whose sentencing is set for June 5.
"It was clear that what Scooter was doing in the Wilson case was at Dick's behest," said Kenneth Adelman, a former Reagan administration official who has been close to both men but has broken with Cheney over the Iraq war. "That was clear. It was clear from Dick's notes on the Op-Ed piece that he wanted to go get Wilson. And Scooter's not that type. He's not a vindictive person."
Cheney is arguably the most powerful vice president in U.S. history, and perhaps the most secretive. The trial painted a portrait of a man deeply immersed in the kind of political pushback that is common to all White Houses, yet often presumed to be the province of low-level political operatives, not the vice president of the United States.
Prosecutors played a tape of Libby testifying to a grand jury that Cheney had asked Bush to selectively declassify an intelligence report so Libby could leak it to sympathetic reporters. Cheney's handwritten scribbles were introduced into evidence at the trial, including one that hinted Cheney believed his own staffer, Libby, was being sacrificed.
"Not going to protect one staffer + sacrifice the guy who was asked to stick his neck in the meat-grinder because of the incompetence of others," the note read.
Cheney's defenders insisted the vice president was not out to smear Wilson or even clear his own name, but simply to defend a policy he fiercely believed in.
"There wasn't some Cheney strategy or Wilson strategy," said Mary Matalin, Cheney's former political director. "There was only one strategy: to convey the nature of the intelligence and the nature of the threat."
Matalin said Cheney remained as influential as ever where it counts — with Bush.
Still, liberal critics of the administration had a field day with the trial. They are hoping the Democrats who now control Congress will use the case to investigate Cheney's role further. Schumer, who was among the first to call for a special prosecutor in the case, suggested in an interview that they might.
"I think there is a view in the public that Libby was the fall guy," Schumer said, "and I do think we will look at how the case shows the misuse of intelligence both before and after the war in Iraq."
Such issues are already of intense interest to scholars.
Historians typically pay scant attention to vice presidents, unless they become president. Cheney, though, is an exception. The historian Robert Dallek, who has written about presidents including Lyndon Johnson, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Ronald Reagan and John F. Kennedy, predicts that scholars will "be racing for vice presidential records in a way that we've never seen before" to answer questions raised by the Libby trial.
"It will deepen the impressions of someone who was a tremendous manipulator and was very defensive about mistakes, and I think it will greatly deepen the impression of a political operator who knew the ins and outs of Washington hardball politics," Dallek said. "He's going to be, I think, the most interesting vice president in history to study."
On a personal level, friends of the vice president say the trial has been deeply painful for him. Libby and Cheney were all but inseparable, often starting their days by riding to work together.
Libby accompanied the vice president almost everywhere he went, and Cheney made clear his high professional and personal regard for his aide, even hosting a book party for him in 2002 at his official residence.
Alan Simpson, a Republican former senator from Cheney's home state, Wyoming, said he saw Cheney over Christmas, and asked him how he was doing. He took the answer as a kind of oblique reference to the Libby case.
"He said, 'I'm fine, I'm O.K., I have people I trust around me — it's the same old stuff, Al,'" Simpson recalled.
Another friend of Cheney's, Vin Weber, a Republican former congressman, said the verdict has "got to be heartbreaking for the vice president." But he said he wished Cheney would explain himself.
"I don't think he has to do a long apologia, but I think he should say something, just to pierce the boil a little bit."
So far, Cheney has issued a two-paragraph statement saying only that he was disappointed with the verdict, "saddened for Scooter and his family" and would have no further comment while an appeal is pending. |
