Scooter and Judy, cut the whining about coercion and rights! You’re a couple of liars who only respond to hardcore proof — like Secret Service logs, writes this year’s Woodward & Bernstein-rolled-into-one, Murray Waas:
New York Times reporter Judith Miller told the federal grand jury in the CIA leak case that she might have met with I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby on June 23, 2003 only after prosecutors showed her Secret Service logs that indicated she and Libby had indee met that day in the Executive Office Building adjacent to the White House, according to attorneys familiar with her testimony.
ReddHedd has a professional’s insights into this story at FireDogLake. In Crap! Those Pesky Records! — with the background as a public defender of criminals in federal prosecutiions — he writes that “[i]n this particular matter, what Judy and Scooter forgot is that they are dealing with a professional [Fitzgerald].”
Not some slackass, just out of law school, wet behind the ears kid. Not some political social climber who would sell his mother for a Senate seat or a nomination to the Federal bench. Not some guy who was going to phone it in because he didn’t want to piss off the high and mighty and powerful. This guy is a professional prosecutor, who does his job. Period.
You don’t prosecute the Gambinos, Sheik Omar Abdel Rachman, Osama Bin Laden and former Governor Ryan of Illinois just for kicks. Those cases are all long, hard slogs, and potentially very deadly to your career as well as your person.
And when you do your job, you find things like this: all government buildings after 9/11 (and even before 9/11 in a lot of cases) require that you sign in and out. That goes double for buildings where you have the potential for someone being around national security documents or highly placed government officials, because you don’t want something disappearing without some written record of who has had access to the building. You follow the paper trail, the evidence in hand, the usual patterns of behavior, and sometimes even your gut — but it is the little details that nail someone to the wall.During her first go at her testimony, Judy was evasive and could not recall whether or not she had ever met with Scooter on June 23rd, when asked specifically about this by the Special Prosecutor. (Note to witnesses: If the prosecutor is asking you about a date certain, he has something that he will nail your ass with unless you are completely truthful. Keep that in mind in the future.)
Perry Mason would have LOVED this:
A gotcha moment can be a rare and beautiful one for any attorney, and usually occurs over some very specific detail on which you can hang the person on the stand. But it is almost always a detail that the witness thought was so insignificant that no one would ever bother with it in a million years.
Wrong.
For Judy Miller, that detail was a Secret Service log from June 23, 2003. It showed her entering and exiting the Executive Office Building adjacent to the White House to meet with Scooter Libby.
ReddHedd’s riff on the Waas revelations is a must-read. It’s long, but worth it. And I loved this part:
My read on all of this is that Scooter is in very big trouble. And Judy is on a very, very short leash. If Fitz finds out that she has lied about anything else, held back anything, tried to cover for anyone else’s ass, she’s toast.
Billmon also adds spin to this story:
Libby may have figured that the best way to spread the story was to let Judy get a game of “telephone” going. Or maybe he didn’t know all the details of Plame’s identity and employment (or didn’t want to know them officially) and tasked Judy with the job of ferreting them out.
“Valerie Flame,” then, might have been a name Judy brought to her second meeting with Libby, rather than one she took away from it. (I’m bad with names, too, so I’m not in a good place to criticize, but you’d think that in a case like that, where you’re helping the necon Mafia trash somebody, you’d at least double check the spelling.)
If such a scenario were true, one could easily understand why Scooter and Judy would prefer not to mention their June meeting in their initial remarks to the grand jury. This, however, also would have been extraordinarily stupid, since it turns out that Judy called on Scooter at his digs in the Old Executive Office building, where she would have had to have been logged in and out. …
