Like Swiss Cheese

TM has outdone himself today over at JustOneMinute. First up, another shot aimed at the would-be media coverage of the Libby trial:

Neil Lewis of the Times continues to cover the Libby trial and he continues to deliver his version of the old George Carlin joke, which I paraphrase: "In baseball action, we have some partial scores; it's Detroit 2. Now for the weather..."

My plea to Mr. Lewis - this trial has involved defense attorneys responding to the presentation offered by Special Counsel Fitzgerald; feel free to feature both.

Lewis' piece in yesterday's Times argued that the 'surety' in Libby's voice would be heard wafting through the courtroom and as the jury listened to tapes of his Grand Jury testimony. When they heard said testimony, they would plainly see the contrast between the certainty on-tape and the implausibility of the bad-memory defense.

Of that TM writes:

A parade? I love a parade! But what witnesses did Mr. Lewis have in mind?

Marc Grossman of the State Dept., who told the FBI that he spoke with Libby on the phone about Ms. Plame but told the jury they spoke face to face?

Bob Grenier of the CIA, who told the FBI and the grand jury that he was not sure whether he mentioned Ms. Plame to Libby, but had finally remembered in 2005 that he had?

Craig Schmall of the CIA, who told the jury that he must have mentioned Plame because it was in his notes, but he that he does not actually remember having done so?

Cathie Martin of Cheny's press relations office, who told the jury she briefly mentioned Plame to Libby sometime in June or July; eventually that was dated to June 11 and (my guess) is the Cheney-Plame reference Libby does remember from that period.

And Ari Fleischer and David Addington joined the parade as well.

So, three out of six had a credible memory of discussing Plame with Libby. Three out of six did not.

You can live with .500 if we were talking baseball. While trying for a conviction, I'm not sure that's a resounding case.

Later in the day, there was more (there always is!). Surprise of surprises, it's yet more on the shabby state of coverage and involvement in this mess on the part of journalists, this time Nick Kristof:

A few questions for Mr. Kristof and the Times:

1. Did you meet with both Joe and Valerie Wilson in May 2003 at breakfast when Wilson told you his story, as reported in Vanity Fair?

2. Did you guess, suspect, or know, prior to the Novak column in July, that Ms. Plame had a CIA affiliation? Your Oct 11, 2003 "denial" was overly specific:

I know Mrs. Wilson, but I knew nothing about her CIA career and hadn't realized she's "a hell of a shot with an AK-47,'' as a classmates at the CIA training "farm,'' Jim Marcinkowski, recalls.
Well, I know Nick Kristof is a columnist at the Times but I would not claim to be knowledgable about his entire career. Can we try for a simple yes or no to my much easier question - did you know, suspect, or have reason to believe that she was with the CIA?

3. These other points were covered to my dissatisfaction a while back, but...

Any chance that in a public column, rather than hidden away on your blog, you will acknowledge that your use of the word "behest" in your June 13, 2003 column was an error? In the secret places of the Times website you offered this:

One of the criticisms from the right is that I say that the vice president dispatched Wilson to Niger, but that's incorrect. The wording in the column is simply that Cheney asked for more information about the uranium deal, and then the former ambassador was dispatched. And that’s what happened.

In fairness, though, it is true that Cheney apparently didn’t know that Wilson had been dispatched. If I’d known that I would have said so. And in a later column I said Wilson had been dispatched "at the behest" of Cheney's office; it's true that he was sent in response to Cheney's prodding, but that wording wasn't choice because it can easily be read to mean that Cheney asked for the trip.

4. As to the notion that Wilson debunked the Niger forgeries, you wrote this on June 13 2003:
Officials now claim that the C.I.A. inexplicably did not report back to the White House with this envoy's findings and reasoning, or with an assessment of its own that the information was false. I hear something different. My understanding is that while Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet may not have told Mr. Bush that the Niger documents were forged, lower C.I.A. officials did tell both the vice president's office and National Security Council staff members.
Do you want to stand by the claim that lower level officials were told about the forgeries in March 2002? From your secret confessions post we find this:

The better objection is that the references to the documents themselves make it sound as if the envoy may have had the documents in possession, while in fact he didn’t. The U.S. didn’t obtain the documents themselves until the fall of that year. But we did then have the information in them, including the full text and the names of the ministers who signed the contracts. And Wilson was briefed on the details of the contracts in his meeting with C.I.A. and State Department experts on Feb. 19, 2003.

...So could Wilson have debunked documents that he hadn't seen? Well, yes. If he knew details of the contract and reported back that it was implausible, sure. Did he? By the spring of 2003, the problems in the signatures of the documents had been pointed out, but I don't see much evidence that they had been noted in 2002 by Wilson or anybody else. Rather, the debunking of the contract was based mostly on the implausibility of obtaining uranium in Niger because of the way the industry was structured.

So Wilson has said that he misspoke when he made references to the documents to me and to two other journalists.

So Wilson "misspoke". Is it OK with you if Libby tried to get that error acknowledged?

5. You also write this:

But it does seem to be true that Wilson claims to have debunked the Niger deal more firmly than some people remember him debunking it.

Let's recap - Libby was pushing back against a Kristof column that claimed, in error, that Wilson had gone at the behest of the VP; that Wilson had debunked forgeries he had not seen; and that Wilson's report was definitive. And pushing back against that pile of rubbish amounted to an attempt to "discredit" Wilson.

6. Almost done - were you or anyone at the Times aware that Wilson was an adviser to the Kerry campaign as of May 2003? Shouldn't his partisan affiliation have been noted?

We wait anxiously for Mr. Kristof's explanation. Or should I say, we will be waiting...and waiting...and waiting.

Saving the best for last, TM calmly skewers "former prosecutor and current Bush-loather" Christy Hardin-Smith: In Ms. Hardin-Smith's world Special Counsel Fitzgerald walks on water except on those occasions when he elects to spread his angel wings and fly. So let's open the time vault and have Ms. Hardin-Smith tell us how Fitzgerald cracked the cover-up of the June 23 meeting:

The beauty of being a Federal Prosecutor with a mind like a steel trap and a loyal staff of lawyers and investigators is that you have all the means at your disposal to try and track down every single piece of evidence: every scrap of paper, every note, every receipt, every entry log every photo, everything you can get your hands on, before ever asking a question of anyone on the record in court.
...
In this particular matter, what Judy and Scooter forgot is that they are dealing with a professional. Not some slackass, just out of law school, wet behind the ears kid. Not some political social climber who would sell his mother for a Senate seat or a nomination to the Federal bench. Not some guy who was going to phone it in because he didn’t want to piss off the high and mighty and powerful. This guy is a professional prosecutor, who does his job.

Period.

You don’t prosecute the Gambinos, Sheik Omar Abdel Rachman, Osama Bin Laden and former Governor Ryan of Illinois just for kicks. Those cases are all long, hard slogs, and potentially very deadly to your career as well as your person.

And when you do your job, you find things like this: all government buildings after 9/11 (and even before 9/11 in a lot of cases) require that you sign in and out. That goes double for buildings where you have the potential for someone being around national security documents or highly placed government officials, because you don’t want something disappearing without some written record of who has had access to the building. You follow the paper trail, the evidence in hand, the usual patterns of behavior, and sometimes even your gut — but it is the little details that nail someone to the wall.

During her first go at her testimony, Judy was evasive and could not recall whether or not she had ever met with Scooter on June 23rd, when asked specifically about this by the Special Prosecutor. (Note to witnesses: If the prosecutor is asking you about a date certain, he has something that he will nail your ass with unless you are completely truthful. Keep that in mind in the future.)

Yeah, yeah, my daughters swoon for Orlando Bloom, so I am familiar with the sentiment.

Anyway, the defense has introduced an exhibit highlighting Fitzgerald's monumentally insightful detective work, to wit, Libby's calendar for June 23, 2003. Ms. Miller was scheduled for a half hour at 3:00.

Evidently Mr. Steel Trap was able to infer from that subtle clue that Libby had a meeting set up with Judy, and well done!

Too bad Mr. Steel Trap had not asked for Armitage's calendar for June - he would have noticed Bob Woodward's name, and maybe even asked a few useful questions.

Mr. Steel Trap made me laugh out loud. Mr. Steel Trap's case is getting hole-ier by the day. We've got reporters misremembering their muddled recollections, contradicting their own notes and otherwise shooting the prosecution in the foot nearly every day so far.