WASHINGTON — By his own account, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby was a very busy man on July 10, 2003.
That day, according to his calendar, he had a senior staff meeting; an intelligence briefing with his boss, Vice President Dick Cheney; a CIA briefing; and lunch with Cheney and then-House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.).
He was reviewing more than a dozen terrorist threats and checking up on trouble spots around the globe, such as the ouster of Liberian president Charles Taylor and North Korea's escalating plans for developing nuclear weapons.
Libby also had been busy talking with reporters about a CIA operative who was married to an emerging critic of the Bush administration's march to war in Iraq. On that day in July, he said he had one such conversation, with Tim Russert of NBC News.
Libby goes on trial in U.S. District Court here today, charged with lying to a grand jury about the conversations he had with Russert and other reporters and, in the process, obstructing a federal investigation.
His defense is a novel one: that he was so preoccupied with life-or-death affairs of state that it affected his ability to accurately recall events for federal investigators.
Prosecutors have a simpler explanation: He lied.
The "faulty memory defense," as U.S. District Judge Reggie B. Walton has called it, is just one intriguing aspect of what promises to be one of the most remarkable trials in Washington in years.
Expected to last six weeks, the trial is likely to provide a glimpse into how the White House responded to critics of its Iraq war policies. It will also include testimony from Cheney, marking the first time that a vice president has appeared in a criminal trial.
At a time when most high-profile Washington criminal defendants cop pleas to avoid the glare of the courtroom, the case should provide a rare display of political theater, a throwback to the days of Watergate and the Iran-Contra arms-for-hostages scandal, which played out in the same federal courthouse where Libby's fate will be decided.
The politically charged case against Libby may be the closest thing that critics of the Bush administration ever get to a public trial dealing with the justifications for the Iraq war.
While Walton has made it clear that he intends to keep the case narrowly focused on questions of whether Libby lied, legal experts say it may be difficult for the jury to leave behind their feelings about the war.
