Libby seeks administration documents

WASHINGTON -- Lawyers for former vice presidential aide I. Lewis ''Scooter" Libby are citing prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald's disclosure last week that President Bush had authorized Libby to leak sensitive Iraqi intelligence as justification for a request to obtain thousands of documents that could shed new light on the administration's use of prewar intelligence.

In papers filed late Wednesday night in connection with Libby's perjury indictment, his lawyers accuse Fitzgerald of trying to ''have it both ways" by revealing information about the inner workings of the administration while dismissing their own requests for similar information as irrelevant to the charges, which concern only whether Libby lied under oath about his contacts with reporters.

''Far from focusing on what Mr. Libby said and did, the government's disclosure focused on the role of two other players in the matter, President Bush and Vice President [Dick] Cheney, setting off an avalanche of media interest," Libby's lawyer wrote. ''In other words, the government has effectively conceded that the case extends far beyond Mr. Libby, but refuses to provide defendant with discovery that reflects that fact."

Libby's request could lead to greater attention on the administration's handling of Iraqi intelligence, and is being made at a time when Bush's past statements about Iraq's weapons have come under renewed scrutiny.

On Sunday the Washington Post reported that when Bush proclaimed, ''We have found the weapons of mass destruction" in May 2003 following the seizure of two trailers he described as mobile bioweapons labs, a team of specialists had already told the White House that the trailers had nothing to do with making weapons.

And last month the magazine National Journal revealed that Bush had been directly warned in October 2002 that specialists at the Energy and the State departments disagreed with other analysts' conclusions that certain aluminum tubes sought by Iraq were ''related to a uranium enrichment effort" for a nuclear weapons program, saying the tubes were instead most likely to be used to make conventional rockets.

Three months later, in his January 2003 State of the Union address, Bush cited the tubes as one of two pieces of evidence that Iraq had a nuclear program, saying, ''Our intelligence sources tell us that [Iraq] has attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes suitable for nuclear weapons production."

In the same speech Bush said, ''The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."

On July 6, 2003, after the US invasion of Iraq and its failure to find any weapons of mass destruction, former ambassador Joseph Wilson IV wrote in a New York Times column that the CIA had sent him to Niger the previous year to investigate the uranium allegation and that he had reported back that it was probably a hoax.

Days later journalist Robert Novak revealed in a column that Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame Wilson, was a CIA operative who had helped her husband obtain the assignment.

Later that year the Justice Department launched an investigation into whether anyone in the administration had leaked Plame Wilson's identity in an attempt to discredit her husband. Libby was indicted in the probe on a charge of lying to a grand jury.

In the new filing, Libby's lawyers emphasize that Bush and Cheney did not authorize their client to leak Plame Wilson's identity. Rather, they say, Libby was authorized to disclose selected prewar analysis that could demonstrate that, contrary to Wilson's suggestion, Bush's Niger claim reflected the consensus of the intelligence community at the time.

The filing also sheds further light on Libby's defense strategy in the perjury case. The filing says Libby wants to show that Plame Wilson's identity was viewed as ''peripheral" and that exposing her role was not part of the White House's planned response to Joseph C. Wilson IV. Thus, ''any misstatements he made" to the grand jury about whether he told reporters about Plame while discussing Niger were ''innocent mistakes."

''The defense intends to show the jury that the controversy over intelligence failures during the spring and summer of 2003 led certain officials within the White House, the State Department, and the CIA to point fingers at each other," the filing says. ''This bureaucratic infighting provides necessary context for the testimony of witnesses from different government agencies."

It adds: ''Mr. Libby plans to demonstrate that the indictment is wrong when it suggests that he and other government officials viewed Ms. Wilson's role in sending her husband to Africa as important."

To build that defense, Libby's lawyers say they need access to any documents about the circumstances and results of Wilson's trip to Niger, as well as documents sent, received, or reviewed in the spring and summer of 2003 by potential witnesses in the perjury case.

In particular, they say they want to scrutinize former undersecretary of state Marc Grossman, who testified that he told Libby that Wilson's wife worked at the CIA. Libby testified that he remembered no such conversation. The filing also mentions White House political adviser Karl Rove and former White House press secretary Ari Fleischer.

Fitzgerald has opposed the requests for the documents, dubbing them ''graymail," a defense strategy of threatening to expose state secrets in a trial in order to derail a prosecution.