“No, that would be impossible”: Russert’s dramatic testimony

“No, that would be impossible, because I didn’t know who that person was until several days later.”

—Tim Russert, testifying today in the D.C. federal courthouse

With those 17 words, spoken about half way through his brief 11-minutes of testimony today, Tim Russert demolished not just Scooter Libby’s hopes of not being convicted of perjury and obstruction of justice, but also the tottering hulk of the Bush administration’s credibility. Russert had just been asked by Prosecutor Fitzgerald whether he and Libby had discussed Valerie Plame Wilson in a phone call on July 10, 2003. That was the call in which, according to Scooter’s story, he had learned of the existence of Plame “as if for the first time” from Russert. We in the media room and the jurors in the courtroom had just sat through the last four hours of Libby’s grand jury testimony, four hours in which Libby, who was known inside the White House as ‘Cheney’s Cheney,’ had over and over claimed that he had learned about Plame from Russert.

The drama of it reminded me of the ending of Alice in Wonderland, when, with the Red Queen screaming “Off with her head!”, Alice brings the court proceedings to a halt by simply saying, “You’re nothing but a pack of cards!”, after which the courtroom and all her tormentors dissolve away into nothing as she wakes from her nightmare.** Can a few words of truth help bring our own long national nightmare to an end, too?

The fact that it was Russert who delivered the coup de grace is deliciously ironic, especially in light of the fact that just a week or two ago he was being mocked for being Cheney’s patsy, after it was revealed at the trial that Meet The Press was Cheney’s platform of choice for ‘catapulting propaganda.’ Even we got a few digs in. Today, Russert was solemn and humble, and when during cross examination Libby’s defense attorney Ted Wells began to accuse him of hypocrisy for first talking to the FBI and then attempting to avoid Fitzgerald’s subpoena, Russert elicited some sympathy, I believe, for defending himself from Libby’s crazy story, while still standing up for the right of journalists to protect their sources (especially when those sources are not trying to conceal a crime by trying to implicate you. Think about it.).

Next up will be the defense witnesses. At the very end of the day today, we heard that these might include six journalists: Jill Abramson and David Sanger of the N.Y. Times, Glenn Kessler, Walter Pincus, and Bob Woodward of the Washington Post, and Evan Thomas of Newsweek. Most of them will presumably testify that they did not hear about Plame from Libby. Yeah, that’ll do it.

**Though of course, physically, Russert is more of a Cheshire cat than an Alice.