Libby Trial Reflects a Secrecy-Obsessed Administration
Former New York Times reporter Judith Miller this week may have proved to be a lousy witness–often dithering and plagued by seemingly stunning memory lapses–but at this point press critics who expected the perjury trial of Lewis "Scooter" Libby to add up to a scathing indictment of the Washington reporting corps have to be disappointed.
Well, at least a little.
What has emerged in U.S. District Court even more dramatically than the media's well-documented though often overstated shortcomings is an intimate and at times amusing portrait of how an administration obsessed with secrecy dispatches its apparatchiks to obfuscate, plant, plot, and discredit.
And while it may take more than the Libby trial to elicit any measurable sympathy for reporters who have had to deal with the West Wing's wall of doublespeak through the buildup to the Iraq war and beyond, consider this: Patrick Fitzgerald, one of the most aggressive prosecutors in the country and equipped with subpoena powers and a grand jury, couldn't get former White House spokesman Ari Fleischer to admit–on the witness stand–that he was with the president in Entebbe, Uganda, in July 2003.
(White House reporters told me this week that the president's Entebbe visit was pretty memorable: On the ground at the airport they could see an Air France jet that was hijacked in 1976 and whose passengers were freed in a raid by Israeli special forces. Fleischer's briefings, "Aboard Air Force One En Route to Entebbe, Uganda," can also be found on the White House website.)
And the former spokesman's on-the-stand anecdote about how a reporter said "prove it" when told by Fleischer that al Qaeda had attacked the United States can be read two ways. Is it really, as Fleischer intended to suggest, proof of an inept media? Or does it say more about Fleischer's–and the White House's–negligible credibility with the press corps even at the early stage of the Bush presidency?
The Libby trial is many things to many people, including an important test of reporter-source privilege–if, indeed, there is such a thing. (More journalists are on the witness list–former Time magazine reporter Matthew Cooper was on the stand Wednesday afternoon, telling jurors that top White House political adviser Karl Rove was the first to tell him that Joseph Wilson's wife worked for the CIA, and NBC's Tim Russert and potentially a handful of others are also expected to be called.)
Yes, Miller is a lousy witness. Yes, Miller and others wrote some misguided stories that had far-reaching and drastic effects. And yes, though the Libby grand jury investigation has unfairly caricatured most of the working press in Washington as administration lap dogs, reporters everywhere engage in sometimes complicated deal making with sources to get stories.
(Read Miller's testimony about "on the record," "on background," "on deep background," and "off the record," and about Libby's desire to be identified as a "former Hill staffer" to see how the dance can work.)
But that's not why a former high-ranking administration official is on trial for lying to a grand jury or why a parade of government witnesses and reporters have been testifying about the inner workings of the White House and press rooms.
It's because in mid-2003, senior staff at the White House–according to Libby's own handwritten notes–decided that the media was taking seriously a guy named Joseph Wilson, who had come back from a CIA-sponsored trip to Niger with news about Iraq and weapons of mass destruction that the administration didn't like.
Wilson was leading the news, and people were questioning the president's trustworthiness, Libby wrote. Worse, he continued, in seemingly an echo of Rove's thoughts, people were beginning to accept Wilson as a credible expert.
And that, of course, would have to change.
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