Jason Leopold: Libby Filing - A Denial & a Mystery

Defense attorneys for I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby said in a court filing late Wednesday that the former chief of staff for Vice President Dick Cheney doesn't remember a conversation he had with a State Department official in June 2003 in which the official told Libby that Valerie Plame Wilson worked for the CIA.

But the conversation did take place, according to current and former administration officials and attorneys who have remained close to the two-year-old CIA leak probe. At least a half-dozen witnesses who testified before a grand jury over the past two years said that they were at the meeting when Marc Grossman, the former Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, told Libby that Plame Wilson worked for the CIA, according to attorneys and US officials close to the two-year-old CIA leak probe. Grossman also told Libby that Plame Wilson got the CIA to send her husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, on a fact-finding trip to Niger in February 2002 to check out reports that Iraq tried to purchase uranium from the African country. Wilson took the trip and reported back to the CIA in March that he found no evidence that Iraq tried to acquire uranium.

"It's not just Mr. Grossman's word against Mr. Libby's," said one former State Department official knowledgeable about the substance of the conversation between Grossman and Libby. "There were other people present at the meeting at the time when Mr. Grossman provided Mr. Libby with details about Ms. Plame's employment with the agency. There is an abundance of evidence Mr. Fitzgerald has that will prove this."

Plame Wilson was unmasked as a covert CIA operative in a July 14, 2003, column written by Robert Novak. Ambassador Wilson believes White House officials leaked his wife's name as retribution because he publicly accused the administration of "twisting" intelligence to win support for the war against Iraq.

Libby's defense attorneys said Libby did not intentionally lie about how he found out that Plame Wilson worked for the CIA. They said Libby was dealing with national security issues and other pressing matters and simply forgot about the details regarding how he found out about Plame Wilson's employment.

The meeting between Libby and Grossman is a crucial part of the government's case against Libby. It demonstrates that Libby knew about Plame Wilson a month or so before her name was published in a newspaper column and proves that Libby lied to the grand jury when he testified that he found out about Plame Wilson from reporters in July 2003.

The facts surrounding Libby's conversation with Grossman surfaced in the obstruction of justice and perjury indictment Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald secured against Libby last October.

In the indictment, Fitzgerald wrote that Grossman told Libby "on or about June 11 or 12, 2003, that, in sum and substance, Wilson's wife worked at the CIA and that State Department personnel were saying that Wilson's wife was involved in the planning of his trip."

But Libby's attorneys, for the first time Wednesday, said Libby doesn't "recall" speaking with Grossman about Plame Wilson.

"During his grand jury appearances, Mr. Libby testified that he did not recall any conversations with Mr. Grossman about Mr. Wilson's wife," says the court filing written by Libby's attorneys.

Grossman has turned out to be an important witness for the prosecution, people close to the probe said.

The former Under Secretary of State derided the campaign to discredit Wilson and was outraged that the White House retaliated against Wilson by leaking his wife's identity to reporters, people close to Grossman said.

Grossman has provided FBI investigators and Fitzgerald with detailed information about the behind-the-scenes effort by Libby and other White House officials to undercut Ambassador Wilson's credibility. Grossman testified before a grand jury that the leak of Plame Wilson's name and CIA status to reporters was an "act of revenge" against her husband's criticism of the administration's use of the uranium claims in President Bush's January 28, 2003, State of the Union address.

Grossman, now vice chairman at The Cohen Group, an international lobbying firm in Washington, DC, was traveling Thursday. His assistant said he could not be reached for comment.

Attorneys as well as current and former administration officials close to the case said Grossman was the lone dissenting unnamed official quoted in a September 28, 2003, Washington Post story who told two Post reporters that "two top White House officials" called "at least six Washington journalists and disclosed the identity and occupation of Wilson's wife."

"Clearly, it was meant purely and simply for revenge," the Washington Post quoted the senior administration official, whom sources have identified as Grossman, as saying. According to sources, Grossman told the Post that the Plame Wilson leak was "wrong and a huge miscalculation, because they were irrelevant and did nothing to diminish Wilson's credibility."

Additionally, Grossman provided a dissenting opinion for a July 20, 2005, Associated Press story. Identified as a "retired state department official," Grossman told the AP that a classified State Department memo disputed the legitimacy of administration claims that Iraq sought to acquire uranium from Niger. The memo also contained a few lines about Plame Wilson's CIA employment, which were marked as secret.

The memo was written in June 2003 by Carl Ford, the former head of the Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR), at the request of Grossman. The memo was prepared after a Washington Post story quoted an unnamed former US official who said the White House knowingly used bogus intelligence about Iraq's threat to purchase uranium from Niger. The US official who spoke to the Post on background has since been identified as former Ambassador Joseph Wilson.

Speaking to the AP on background, Grossman said the INR memo "wasn't a Wilson-Wilson wife memo. It was a memo on uranium in Niger and focused principally on our disagreement" with the White House.

"The former State Department official stressed the memo focused on Wilson's trip and the State Department intelligence bureau's disagreement with the White House's claim about Iraq trying to get nuclear material. He said the fact that the CIA officer and Wilson were husband and wife was largely an incidental reference," the July 20, 2005, AP story says, quoting Grossman, according to people close to the leak case.

In the interest of fairness, any person identified in this story who believes he has been portrayed unfairly or that the information in this story is untrue will have the opportunity to respond in this space.

Jason Leopold spent two years covering California's electricity crisis as Los Angeles bureau chief of Dow Jones Newswires. Jason has spent the last year cultivating sources close to the CIA leak invesigation, and will be a regular contributer to t r u t h o u t.

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