Libby was indicted in October 2005 on charges that he lied under oath about conversations with three reporters about Plame. In testimony, he had acknowledged talking with the reporters about Plame, but said he was passing along tips he had heard from other reporters, including Russert.
But Russert has testified that he was not the source, and the other journalists have said it was Libby who told them about Plame. And Fitzgerald turned up evidence that Libby was assiduously gathering information about Wilson and Plame and learned her identity through a number of sources, including Cheney.
Fitzgerald has said that Libby's testimony set the investigation back months.
The government is expected to call the reporters, then-Time magazine White House correspondent Matthew Cooper, former New York Times reporter Judith Miller, and Russert. Others expected to testify for the prosecution include former White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer, who, according to court documents, had a conversation over lunch where Libby told him about Plame but stressed that the information was "on the q.t."
Libby, who is represented by three major law firms and backed by a legal defense fund that has raised millions, is expected to call other journalists with whom he spoke during that period to show that he did not disclose information about Plame to them or that her identity had become widely known.
He is also expected to challenge the testimony of Cooper and Miller. Each had initially resisted cooperating with Fitzgerald in talking about conversations they had with Libby because they considered him a confidential source they wanted to protect. Miller spent 85 days in jail for contempt before cooperating.
But mainly, Libby is betting on what one lawyer calls his "busy man defense." Walton has said that Libby plans to use "a dizzying panoply" of information to make the point, including CIA-scrubbed summaries of classified information.
"The defendant anticipates using 'dots' on a PowerPoint presentation to show that during the time period critical to the indictment he was presented with several hundred other pieces of classified information," the judge said in an order last month. The defense is unusual because Libby is in essence admitting that he may not have told the truth, which lawyers said is a risky gambit in perjury cases, where defendants usually argue that what they said was technically true or that they were confused by the questions posed to them.
