1. Anonymous says:

    Good to get back to this and sink our sharp teeth into the meaty bits next to the bone!

    Question… if Libby doesn’t want the jury to see his letters to Judy, or whomever, is it possible that there are coded messages which haven’t been teased out yet, but might jump out visually to fresh eyes? The language is stilted enough, but the arrangement of words on paper might be critical.

    With suspected codes for evangelicals in Presidential speeches and suspected codes for terrorists in bin Ladin’s speeches, the emphasis has been upon words as sounded… but what about visuals???

  3. Anonymous says:

    Call me crazy, but when I ask someone to do something, and they don’t comply for well over a month, I don’t consider that cooperation. I consider it stalling.

    That was the funniest part of Libby’s filings. And it’s especially the case when, of course, the cooperation happens six days after the special prosectutor was appointed.

    Novak has just blabbed incessantly about how the only three sources he testified about were Armitage, Turdblossom, and Harlow. But here Libby is, asserting that Novak was not only subpoenaed about Libby, but testified.

    Nice, even though I’m not quite sure that Novak said the only sources he testified about were those three. And while we’re at it, I’m waiting for someone to ask Novak about the report that he went in to testify again some time after Rove’s October 2005 appearance before the grand jury, about which Novak has been silent and misleading.

    For me, the new detail that Martin and Jenny Mayfield were present for Libby’s call with Matt Cooper opens up a whole set of questions. First of all, the order and character of events of July 12, 2003. Cheney, Libby and Martin flew back and forth on AF2 that day, and on the way back to DC they did press strategy. Libby had his phone calls with journalists that day, and presumably for the call with Cooper he was either at his office or at home, Martin was with him and Mayfield joined them. Libby talked with Cooper before the two phone calls with Miller, and I can’t recall where Kessler falls in that order. So one set of questions is: were Martin and Mayfield present for the phone calls with Miller? And remember, interestingly, that Fitzgerald seems to have learned that there was a second, longer (37 minute-long) phone call with Miller, after the brief, 3-minute phone call with her. Were they present for the short one and not for the longer? Or neither?

    More generally, what did Martin and Mayfield testify to? My own pet obsession with Libby’s notes and the related question of whether Libby brought up his June session with Cheney where Cheney told Libby that Plame worked at CPD or whether investigators brought it up with Libby first makes me wonder whether Mayfield, about whom I believe we heard almost or absolutely nothing, might have been the one who deciphered Libby’s notes, which were written in his own private shorthand.

    Which reminds me that in one of the other filings, there is an effort too make Libby’s note from that session sound more innocuous than it does, by inserting a comma that is not in his notes, in order to make it sound like that note would indicate that Plame was an analyst when in fact it does the opposite.

  4. Anonymous says:

    lemond

    Try that again, I think it should work now.

    Jeff

    I know Novak never said he only testified about 3–but he did get waivers from only three. So which is it? He testified about Libby without a waiver? Or he testified after the indictment, after making sure his waiver was good?

    I kind of think it might be the second of those–that a Libby meeting was the one Kornblut reported on. But that’s gut feel.

    IIRC, Libby was at home for one of his calls–perhaps his Judy call? I half wonder whether, once they knew they had the cut-out seeded with Novak, whether Dick called in any remaining cut-out attempts (Judy), they made sure to build their alibi with each new call by having people witness the call. In any case, there is still much about that 12 July meeting we don’t know, and I suspect if Martin is testifying about it, it will be quite interesting.

    And yes, I saw that comma. I will put up a post. But I read the motion to prevent government from introducing anything about Plame’s status to be an example of using Fitz’ slow release against him–an effort to try to paint Plame as not covered, while also insisting the gov can’t refute it. Not bad work, from Libby’s lawyers, there.

  5. Anonymous says:

    As support for my argument that the Novak-about-Libby subpoena came later–when Libby’s surrogate telegraphed to Judy in September 2005 what to say, he told her to say nothing about Novak. Therefore, by at least September 2005, they didn’t think Novak had testified about Libby.

    Though it’s possible they learned about it in discovery. The Bob Novak line describing what Fitz gave on journalists is totally redacted (and almost certainly includes an exclusion of any reference to Armitage). So perhaps that’s when they figured it out.

  6. Anonymous says:

    EW wrote: â€Call the President to the stand, and have him repeat his doubts that no one would go to jail because journalists are so good at protecting their sources. That ought to cover it.â€

    Awesome! That made me laugh. I’m not sure if you meant that merely tongue-in-cheek in a snarky sort of way, or if you are serious about that. Because while I thought it was initially pretty witty in a funny way, it actually seems sort of relevant. Could Fitz introduce Bush’s comment without dragging him onto the witness stand? Could Fitz just introduce a piece of a television broadcast showing what Bush said, and say it’s relevant in terms of Libby’s state of mind? (Or were you just joking?)

  7. Anonymous says:

    emptywheel,

    it is just â€lawyer speak.â€

    Trying to make sense of it is very difficult unless you live and breathe it.

    I sometimes write up â€scopes†and intial contract outlines for what I think a fair arrangement should be for some bit of science/technology.
    You know the elements. â€We do and get.†â€You do and get.†â€This has to happen, here, then, before, after, now, later, OR.â€

    And then I have to wade back through it and get deciphered what the lawyers come up with finally.

    One thing though. Is this a Jury trial? Seems kind of technical for a Jury.

  9. Anonymous says:

    I half wonder

    What I suspect would look suspicious to Fitzgerald is if Libby spoke uniquely to Miller out of the presence of others on July 12, which would conveniently fit with my hypothesis that Miller was the specific target of OVP’s narrow but robust coordinated effort. We know that Fitzgerald did not know until relatively late in the game about the second, longer phone call between Libby and Miller on that day. That may mean that the first call was in the presence of Martin and/or Mayfield, the second not. But that may have a more innocent explanation: Miller was in a cab on her cell phone or something like that for the phone call, so it’s perfectly possible she wanted to talk again at length once she got to her home in the Hamptons (which is where the second call took place, I believe).

    Can I just mention that I find Jodi’s posts to be somewhat annoying with surprisingly consistent regularity?

  11. Anonymous says:

    Can I just mention that I find Jodi’s posts to be somewhat annoying with surprisingly consistent regularity?

    I find jodi’s posts to be entirly humorous

    It’s kinda funny to read an idiot’s view

    especially from an idiot who is trying to derail the investigation and confuse the issue

    jodi is the comic relief. she does posts to make you laugh at her supposed incompetence

    jodi is almost as funny as scooter’s lawyers and legal claims

    when you got nuttin, you just gotta make shit up

    anybody notice how jodi is a legal expert but she don’t know nothing about jury selection and such ???

    how likely is that ???

    you just keep thinking jodi, that’s what you’re good at

  12. Anonymous says:

    Libby’s lawyers’ logic boggles the mind:

    Novak’s column mentioning Ms. Wilson’s CIA employment, because he had never engaged in any effort, concerted or otherwise, to disclose Ms. Wilson’s identity, and because he had no reason to believe that the conversations he had with reporters regarding Ms. Wilson were unlawful or wrongful in any respect.

    They admit that Libby had conversations in which he disclosed Plame’s identity yet have the nerve to assert that he was not engaged in an effort, personal or otherwise, to disclose her identity. Libby’s lawyers show true audacity here. It is as if they are openly flouting Libby’s crime in order to show that he did not commit the crime. We are truly dealing with malicious hacks here.

  14. Anonymous says:

    Reading these three motions I wondered which witnesses defense was saying in them it would like not to call, or if called, to question very narrowly. Tenet seems like someone likely to answer a few questions too amply for defense’s taste, and perhaps too unpredictably. I was trying to recall which year precisely RClarke quit.

    There are other overlaps in parallel stories. While Judy was negotiating the confines of Fitzgerald’s GJ questions once out of jail, two media entities also were suppressing the domestic wiretap story at administration request. I wonder if there was some barter there. The election had passed; the administration could have turned to a more risk-accepting strategy in the bargaining, having passed the November 2004 test.

    It is true Congress was holding hearings on the federal reporter shield draft legislation around the time Judy was jailed in 2005, but I agree there were multiple reasons Judy stayed quiet; the defense motion to suppress most of what Judy might say in the Libby trial seems to highlight that there is a lot more to the risk she presents as a witness than they are openly discussing. This may figure in the current motions’ reference to ongoing CIPA filtered documents not incorporated in the public record; namly, the complaining that there are only 2 double-spaced pages summary, so Fitzgerald keeps some plans confidential. In a way, the Jeffress and Cline strategy to evoke the specter of graymail succeeded in eliciting a narrowing of charges; but the counts remain volatile.

    I continue to see shades of implicating Rove in the current Byzantine motion to suppress most journalist participation at trial. I even wonder if Kelleher might figure as a witness.

    There are some articles of evidence about which I think we continue to have questions; for example, the possibility I think we discussed a while back, that Judy may have yet more notes, more than the dust bunny notebooks, to account for the funny unchronological and seemingly unreferenced terms that appeared as glosses in the already produced notebook(s). Also, there was the timeline discrepancy between the first series of FBI interviews of Libby and the subsequent production of the sheaf of lost emails, which I thought was sourced through FBI, as well; this has got to be an area of interest in Fitzgerald’s case.

    Just as we had a seesaw for instadeclassify-reclassify legerdermain, with respect to Libby’s state of mind, I believe we continue with some mystery about the NIE or abstract of the NIE which played into those divulgations by Libby in various degrees of depth of detail, perhaps running to excessive depth with Judy, although staying within bounds of the NIE abstract with other reporters receiving declassified material in leaks.

    The defense seems to be opting for the threat of a media circus to forestall the possibility that prosecution might like to find out more here.

    Another parallel would be the civil suit the Wilsons have brought. I would imagine the Libby defense attorneys would be designing the special prosecutor’s options as narrow as possible, hoping to have more turbulence when the other case begins its trial.

    As you listed the attorneys with barter information whose testimony might be germane if defense should call the prosecutor himself as a witness, in a kind of test of the strength of the attorney client privilege paradigm, the Vinovka Luskin events around the Cooper grand jury testimony also came to mind as offering yet another attorney who was talking to the media; I think viget was interested in this detail at the time.