Libby: Fall of a Vulcan

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And almost on cue, the hard-liners' dark fears were realized: within a week, a June 19 online article by the New Republic quoted an unnamed U.S. envoy, who was clearly Wilson, alleging that the Administration knew the yellowcake story "was a flat-out lie" but had used it in the prewar claims anyway. Not long after, Fitzgerald alleges, Libby spoke with his deputy about the article, and the two aides discussed whether information about Wilson's trip might be shared with the press. Libby demurred, saying such a move would cause "complications at the CIA," but added that he "could not discuss the matter on a nonsecure phone."

THE NO-FINGERPRINT LEAKS

Just a few days later, on June 23, Libby met at the Old Executive Office Building with New York Times reporter Judith Miller, who wrote a series of highly controversial, and now largely discredited, stories about Iraq's prewar arsenal of weapons of mass destruction. It was in that session that Libby groused about "selective leaking" at the CIA and first disclosed that Wilson's wife might work at a bureau of the CIA.

Two weeks later, on July 6, Wilson went public, writing an Op-Ed column in the New York Times, retelling the story of his fruitless trip to Niger and hinting that the Bush team didn't really want to know if the prewar intelligence was accurate or not. It was a serious charge and, to the Bush team, an open declaration of war. The next day, Libby told then White House press secretary Ari Fleischer that Wilson's wife worked at the CIA and added that that was a fact not widely known--dropping, perhaps, an invitation to Fleischer to leak it to a friendly reporter. The next day, Libby met again with Judith Miller, and they talked again of Wilson and his wife. Libby strengthened his earlier hunch about Plame's employment at the CIA, and this time, the two discussed how their conversations would be attributed in print. Libby, who once worked for the Congress, wanted to be identified as a "former Hill staffer" to mask the source of the information. (Miller, as things turned out, wrote nothing about Wilson or Plame.) Two days later, Libby heard from Rove (identified in the indictment only as "Official A") that syndicated columnist Robert Novak was planning to write about Wilson and his wife.

THE ALLEGED COVER-UP

When Novak's column naming Plame for the first time appeared, all hell broke loose at the CIA. The agency's lawyers launched an internal probe of the leak, and within months the Justice Department had opened a criminal investigation. Fitzgerald was appointed to run the case, and the hard-charging prosecutor began interviewing witnesses within weeks. That, according to Fitzgerald, is when Libby began to spin his web. In his interviews with the FBI and later in his testimony to the grand jury, Libby swore that he had first heard about Wilson's wife not from other senior officials in June 2003 but instead on July 10 or 11, 2003, from NBC News Washington bureau chief Tim Russert. Libby also told the feds that Russert volunteered in the same call that "all the reporters" knew about Plame's work. Similarly, Libby's account of a brief July 12, 2003, call with TIME's Cooper differs from Cooper's recollection.