Scooter Libby off the hook…or is he?

From Fox News: “Miller 'Can't Recall' Who Leaked Name in CIA Case”

In a first-person account released Saturday on The Times' Web site, Miller recounted her recent grand jury testimony, which focused on her conversations in 2003 with Cheney's closest aide, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby. Miller said she "didn't think" she heard covert CIA officer Valerie Plame's name from Libby. "I said I believed the information came from another source, whom I could not recall."

Yet here’s Miller’s account of her testimony on the NY Times.

My notes indicate that well before Mr. Wilson published his critique, Mr. Libby told me that Mr. Wilson's wife may have worked on unconventional weapons at the C.I.A.

My notes do not show that Mr. Libby identified Mr. Wilson's wife by name. Nor do they show that he described Valerie Wilson as a covert agent or "operative," as the conservative columnist Robert D. Novak first described her in a syndicated column published on July 14, 2003. (Mr. Novak used her maiden name, Valerie Plame.)

So Miller didn’t hear the name “Valerie Plame” from Libby although he hinted that Wilson’s wife worked at the CIA. This doesn’t seem like a mitigating factor to me, even if Libby was trying to counter “selective leaking” by the CIA which was trying to cover up for pre-war intelligence. But then, given that the White House was trying to discredit Joe Wilson well before his NY Times article, it indicates they had concerns about an agent of the government actively working to undermine White House policy. As it turns out, those concerns were justified:

On July 22, 2005, the New York Times published a lengthy, front-page article detailing the work of two senior Bush administration officials, Karl Rove and Scooter Libby, on the Niger-uranium story. A seemingly exhaustive timeline ran alongside the piece. In 19 bullet points, the Times provided its readers in considerable detail with what it regarded as the highlights of the story. The timeline traces events from the initial request for more information on the alleged Iraqi inquiries in Africa to Joseph Wilson's trip to Niger; from the now-famous "16 words" in President Bush's 2003 State of the Union to the details of White House telephone logs; from Bush administration claims that Karl Rove was not involved in the leak to the naming of special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald, and on from there to the dates that White House officials testified before the grand jury.

As I say, seemingly exhaustive. But there is one curious omission: July 7, 2004. On that date, the bipartisan Senate Select Intelligence Committee released a 511-page report on the intelligence that served as the foundation for the Bush administration's case for war in Iraq. The Senate report includes a 48-page section on Wilson that demonstrates, in painstaking detail, that virtually everything Joseph Wilson said publicly about his trip, from its origins to his conclusions, was false.

John Hinderaker of PowerLine believes that Libby is in the clear:

In general, Miller's story seems to exonerate "Scooter" Libby, Dick Cheney's chief of staff, with whom Miller had a series of conversations about Joe Wilson. In the course of those conversations, Valerie Plame's name was mentioned a couple of times, but there is no suggestion that either Libby or Miller had any idea that she was a "covert" CIA employee, rather than an analyst. (In fact, as far as I know, she wasn't.) Reading Miller's account, the impression that this investigation is much ado about nothing is only strengthened.

It does seem that Peter Fitzgerald’s case for indictments is getting more difficult. If Libby didn’t tip off Judith Miller and Karl Rove didn’t tell Robert Novak, it’s not at all clear how this implicates the White House.