WASHINGTON — The disclosure that a Bush administration effort to rebut an Iraq war critic included the president and vice president could undercut a key defense that I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby has raised in defending perjury charges in the CIA leak case, some legal experts and defense lawyers said Friday.
Lawyers for the former White House aide, who is charged with lying to the FBI and a grand jury about whether he leaked the identity of a CIA operative to reporters, have argued that any misstatements he made were inadvertent and resulted from his immersion in more important matters than the agent's identity.
But court papers filed late Wednesday by Special Prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald showed that the administration considered the matter anything but unimportant.
The papers suggest that President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney were directly involved in trying to discredit the assertions of envoy Joseph C. Wilson IV, a critic of the war. His wife, Valerie Plame, was the covert agent whose identity was leaked.
According to the new documents, Libby told a federal grand jury that Cheney instructed Libby, then his chief of staff, to talk with reporters about intelligence that refuted Wilson's claims that the administration was twisting intelligence to justify the war in Iraq. Cheney cited Bush as authorizing the dissemination of classified information to a reporter, according to Libby's testimony.
Those disclosures could make it harder for Libby to argue that he paid little attention to Plame.
"It cuts toward showing the salience of the Plame-Wilson relationship in his mind and the unlikelihood that it would have slipped his mind when he talked to the FBI," said Daniel Richman, a former federal prosecutor who is a professor at Fordham University School of Law.
The papers show that "Libby's mind was quite wellfocused on giving out information about Wilson," Richman said. "This was not something that was haphazard."
Some defense lawyers -- and people close to Libby -- cautioned that the disclosures cut both ways. They said Bush and Cheney's involvement proved a point useful to Libby: He was following the marching orders given by his superiors, who were legitimately attempting to rebut what many considered to be wrongheaded claims from Wilson.
