I Lewis Libby

Former vice presidential aide I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby faces the prospect of becoming the first high-level White House official to go to prison since the Nixon administration, after a federal judge sentenced him Tuesday to serve 2 1/2 years for perjury and obstruction of justice. Though numerous public officials have been investigated, charged and even convicted in the three decades since Watergate, they almost always have avoided prison by appeal, plea bargain or pardon.

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.).

Jury selection in the trial of I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby turned into an assessment of the credibility of the Bush administration Tuesday, with lawyers for the former White House aide asking potential jurors how they feel about the war in Iraq and whether they think present and former administration officials who may be called to testify can be believed.

Seven critics of the Bush administration and the Iraq war were approved as potential jurors in the perjury trial of former White House aide I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby after they said they could set those feelings aside. But two members of the jury pool were dismissed when they said their strong opposition to the administration might color their deliberations in the CIA leak trial.

The prosecutor took a more aggressive stance and jury selection slowed so much Thursday in the perjury trial of former White House aide I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby that the judge postponed opening statements until Tuesday. Libby, a former aide to President Bush and chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney, is charged with perjury and obstruction of the investigation into the disclosure in 2003 of the identity of CIA officer Valerie Plame. Her husband, ex-ambassador Joseph C.

A jury was selected Monday to hear the case against former White House aide I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, who is charged with obstructing a federal probe into the disclosure of a CIA operative's identity. Culminating four days of questioning by lawyers and a judge that often exposed potential panelists' anti-Bush sentiments, 12 jurors and four alternates were selected to hear the case of Libby, 56, the one-time chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney. U.S. District Judge Reggie B.

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.

I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby's defense against perjury charges, which rests in part on what he has described as innocent memory lapses, appeared to gain some ground Wednesday when his lawyers showed that two government witnesses in the case had memory issues of their own.

In the first such account from Vice President Dick Cheney's inner circle, a former aide testified Thursday that Cheney personally directed the effort to discredit an administration critic by having calls made to reporters in 2003. Cheney dictated detailed "talking points" for his chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, and others on how they could impugn the critic's credibility, said Catherine J. Martin, who was the vice president's top press aide at the time.

From their earliest days, U.S. intelligence agencies have made it an article of faith to protect the identity of their secret agents. And in 1982, following a rash of malicious exposures, the CIA prevailed on Congress to make it a crime to knowingly disclose the identity of such operatives. So in 2003, when the name of a CIA arms proliferation specialist, Valerie Plame, surfaced in a newspaper column, the agency immediately demanded a Justice Department investigation.