The Punchin’ Judy Show: Team Libby comes out swinging

Former New York Times reporter Judith Miller was on the stand at the Lewis “Scooter” Libby trial today. Miller spent 85 days in the slammer for refusing to testify to a grand jury about conversations with Libby on the subjects of former ambassador Joe Wilson, his CIA wife and the administration’s insistence that Iraq sought to buy uranium from Niger, but she ultimately cut a deal with prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald allowing her to testify to the grand jury about Libby and Libby alone.

Miller is best known to press aficianados as the reporter most likely to regurgitate unfiltered administration spin on Iraq prior to the war, and for writing the single most bizarre story on Iraq’s banned weapons programs after the invasion. The latter involved an anonymous guy in a ball cap pointing to a patch of sand where he said — not to Miller, because she wasn’t allowed close enough to talk to the guy or even describe him beyond the ball cap — that a bunch of chemicals had been buried. Miller wasn’t alone in promulgating breathless WMD stories after the invasion, but she’s the only reporter to get front page real estate for a story about some guy standing in the desert pointing at nothing.

Did I mention Miller is now a freelance reporter?

Slate’s John Dickerson, who has had his own Libby-related adventures, came up with the best line to date about Miller’s testimony: “[Libby lawyer William] Jeffress’ thinly veiled condescension was enough to create sympathy for Miller. In Washington, that’s like creating cold fusion.”

The condescension arose in connection with Miller’s memory, which apparently doesn’t function absent notes. Miller testified that she spoke with Libby about matters uranium on two occasions in late June and early July of 2003, and that Libby brought up Wilson’s wife on both occasions. The June conversation only came to light after Miller’s first round of grand jury testimony when Fitzgerald specifically asked her whether she had met with Libby in June. Miller says she checked her office after Fitzgerald’s inquiry and found notes from that meeting in a shopping bag under her desk.

Libby partisans celebrated Miller’s testimony about her notoriously bad memory as proof both that she’s an unreliable witness and that Libby’s own bad memory defense is legitimate. There’s some merit to that: Miller is clearly not someone you’d want to send out for your heart medication without taping a note to her forehead. She is, however, the seventh consecutive witness, including six current or former officials from the White House, the state department and the CIA, who testified either that Libby knew Wilson’s wife worked at the CIA before he claims that he learned it from Tim Russert or, in the case of Libby’s successor, David Addington, that Libby wanted to know whether there would be a paper trail if the CIA borrowed an agency employee’s spouse. Miller isn’t someone a prosecutor would want to hang a case on, but she adds weight to a pile that apparently includes Libby’s own notes to the effect that Dick Cheney told him where Valerie Wilson worked.

Today’s other witness was Matt Cooper, the former Time White House reporter who almost but not quite went to jail under the same auspices as Miller, only on Karl Rove’s behalf rather than Libby’s. Cooper was there to testify that Libby confirmed what Rove had told Cooper the previous day: that Valerie Wilson worked at the CIA. Cooper says Libby did so; Libby told investigators that he only said that he’d heard gossip to that effect from other reporters.

Since Cooper has no incentive to lie, the defense had to attack his memory and his notes just as they did with Miller. Judging the impact of his testimony is difficult from a distance, but once again, Libby’s version rests upon his contention that he didn’t remember conversations he had held with various other reporters and government officials — including the ones earlier that week during which he told both Ari Fleischer and Miller that Valerie Wilson worked for the CIA — about a subject with which he and his boss had been obsessed for almost a month. Either way, whether Libby tried to lay the confirmation off on other reporters or whether he confirmed it himself, Cooper’s testimony can’t have done him any good.

On the press watching front, the primary lessons of today’s action are that Matt Cooper and Judy Miller really need to brush up on their note-taking skills, and people who talk to Cooper and Miller should probably take their own contemporaneous notes in order to ensure that what gets printed bears some resemblance to what was said.

On the entertainment front, the big news is that according to Cheney advisor Mary Matalin, Russert, who will be testifying next week, hates Hardball host Chris Matthews, who was causing serious heartburn in the vice president’s office during the period in question. Matalin suggested Libby call Russert to complain about Matthews; Libby did so, and that conversation is the one during which Libby says he learned (or relearned, or re-relearned …) from Russert that Wilson was a CIA officer.

Check out our own Eric Brewer’s Plame-At-A-Glance™ chart for a one-stop refresher on the case. For other news and views, visit the Media Bloggers Association trial page and Media Channel’s collection of daily Libby links. I was on the Charles Goyette Show on Thursday commenting about the trial.