WASHINGTON — I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby feared that White House officials were conspiring to make him the fall guy in the CIA leak scandal to protect political strategist Karl Rove, Libby's lawyer argued Tuesday.
In his opening remarks at Libby's perjury and obstruction trial, defense attorney Theodore Wells Jr. portrayed the former vice presidential aide as a sympathetic figure who was following his boss' orders to rebut an administration critic.
But Wells said Libby came to believe that he had lost the support of the administration he had sought to defend.
"Karl Rove was President Bush's right-hand person in terms of political strategy. Karl Rove was the person most responsible that the Republican Party stayed in office. His fate was important to the Republican Party. He had to be protected," Wells said.
"The person who was to be sacrificed, that's Scooter Libby," Wells said. "The person whose neck had been put in the meat grinder, you'll learn, was Scooter Libby."
Vice President Dick Cheney was concerned that his chief of staff might be unjustly tarred, Wells said, producing an excerpt from a note handwritten by Cheney: "Not going to protect one staffer + sacrifice the guy that was asked to stick his neck in the meat grinder because of the incompetence of others."
Special prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald offered a sharply different portrait of the defendant, saying that Libby had obstructed the search for the truth to protect his boss. Fitzgerald said Libby assiduously gathered information about an outspoken critic of the administration's Iraq policy, former envoy Joseph C. Wilson IV, and his wife, Valerie Plame, from various officials and then discussed the findings with journalists in a series of conversations.
Libby is charged with five counts of perjury and obstruction of justice in connection with his descriptions of those conversations to FBI agents and a federal grand jury. The trial is expected to last up to six weeks and promises testimony from Cheney and such high-profile journalists as Judith Miller, then a reporter for the New York Times; "Meet the Press" moderator Tim Russert of NBC News; and Matthew Cooper, then of Time magazine.
The defense suggestion of a high-level conspiracy, made on the opening day of the trial, was the first indication of a breach within the normally secretive White House over the handling of a case that had cast a legal and political cloud over the Bush administration for three years.
