http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/23/washington/23cnd-libby.html?hp&ex=1169614800&en=a4c42e9196fba8af&ei=5094&partner=homepageLibby a Scapegoat, His Lawyer Tells Jurors
By NEIL A. LEWIS
Published: January 23, 2007
WASHINGTON, Jan. 23 — The chief defense lawyer for I. Lewis Libby Jr. told a jury today that his client was innocent of perjury and obstruction of justice charges and that White House officials had sought to make him a scapegoat in the investigation of the leak of a C.I.A. operative’s name to protect Karl Rove, the White House deputy chief of staff
In his opening statement, Theodore V. Wells Jr., said that the unnamed White House officials wanted to protect Mr. Rove because they believed his survival as President Bush’s political adviser was crucial to saving the Republican Party.
“Scooter Libby was to be sacrificed,” Mr. Wells told the jury on the trial’s first day, using the nickname of Mr. Libby, who was Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff. It was important to keep Mr. Rove out of trouble because, Mr. Wells said, he was the “lifeblood” of the president’s political operation and “was most responsible for seeing the Republican Party stayed in office. He had to be protected.”
Mr. Rove, who has not been charged, has acknowledged having been one of the sources for a July 14 column by Robert Novak that first disclosed the identity of Valerie Plame as a Central Intelligence Agency officer.
Mr. Wells’s remarks followed the opening statement of the chief prosecutor, Patrick J. Fitzgerald, who told the jury that the evidence was clear that Mr. Libby knowingly lied under oath about his conversations with three reporters about Ms. Plame, who is also known by her married name, Valerie Wilson.
Mr. Fitzgerald used charts to demonstrate that Mr. Libby had several conversations with various administration officials in June and July of 2003 in which he learned that Ms. Wilson was the wife of Joseph C. Wilson IV, a former ambassador who had made a trip to Africa to check on reports that Iraq had tried to buy uranium for nuclear weapons.
Mr. Fitzgerald had his own dramatic moment of the day: he played the audio tapes of Mr. Libby’s testimony on two occasions before a grand jury.
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