At the Libby trial today, one juror was dismissed for improper outside contact:
Fitzgerald argued in favor of adding an alternate to the jury, so that 12 could deliberate. That would mean that deliberations would have to start anew. Wells had argued that that would mean that two and a half days of deliberations would be thrown away. Judge Walton just ruled that deliberations will go forward with 11 jurors. If something happens to another juror, then there are two alternates who can be added, although that will mean going back to square one in the deliberations.This comment from Tom Maguire's blog suggests why the Libby defense didn't want to add the first alternate to the jury:
As [defense lawyer] Ted Wells delivered an emotional argument that Libby made "honest mistakes not deliberate lies" during the investigation, this juror sat with her arms crossed. She also clenched her jaw and rolled her eyes.Unfortunately for Libby, the Intrade betting odds for "Libby guilty" still stand at 75%. (Check the left column here.)
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Matt Taibbi:
Meanwhile, across town, the trial of Dick Cheney's former chief of staff, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, provided another grim sideshow to the unfolding Iraq disaster. While the Washington press corps buzzed about the gossip spilling out of the trial on a daily basis -- there were nuggets that Tim Russert hates Chris Matthews, for instance, and that plaster-faced New York Times she-villain Judith Miller keeps her notes in shopping bags under her desk -- the fact that this trial was still about the Iraq War was somehow lost in the shuffle. In a way, the Beltway's tawdry interest in the "Inside Baseball" bullshit emanating from the Libby trial perfectly mirrored the Democrats' half-serious attempts to pass an anti-war resolution... Like the Democrats with their legislative dawdling, they were doing something other than their jobs at the moment of truth and were too stupid to not be proud of it.
In the end, the jury may be too confused to figure out whether it was Russert, or Miller, or Bob Novak, or Bob Woodward, or Dick Armitage, or Karl Rove, or Santa Claus who outed Valerie Plame.
But the public will conclude that they were all trading stories about Joe Wilson's wife, and getting off on it, and not one of them thought to step back and realize the gravity of what they were doing. At each turn both the reporters and the administration went weak in the knees every time they had a secret to share -- the classic example being Armitage's when he spoke to Woodward about Plame. "His wife is in the agency. . . . How about that shit?" he bragged.
This image of overpaid Washington insiders giddy with the game of power politics, using the lives of eighteen-year-olds as poker chips, is what has inspired so much hatred and disgust for mainstream politics in the past half-dozen years or so. It was no accident that the gallery of the Libby trial was filled with correspondents from the blogging world filing daily reports -- Firedoglake, the Huffington Post and BlogHer were represented, among others. They had to be there because . . . well, because there had to be some real reporters there. At least the bloggers know who they're representing. As the trial showed, no one can be all that sure anymore about the Washington media, or the dingbat politicians they hang around with.
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