Judy & Scooter’s Ninety-Nine Faces
Murray Waas’s new report today (via the Daou Report) adds substance to the possibility — beyond reported conflicts between the testimony of Scooter Libby and Judith Miller about their conversations — that, as I wrote last Thursday:
Because of their less-than-forthright dealings with Judith Miller and her attorneys, Joseph Tate (Scooter Libby’s attorney) and Libby may find themselves accused of witness intimidation or tampering. Even if Patrick Fitzgerald, the special prosecutor in the CIA Leak case (aka Plamegate), does not press charges for witness intimidation, Tate may find himself the subject of a state or federal bar disciplinary investigation (depending on the jurisdiction).
Now, the problem that you and I have — and which I imagine that Fitzgerald must also have — is which of these liars to believe. Miller, whose next book should be titled I Have Ninety-Nine Faces, is being excoriated by the press.
Today’s L.A. Times reports that the Pentagon “raised doubts about Miller’s contention that she had a special security clearance that allowed her to report on the search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.” And, at one time, Miller had the gall to deny to the NYT’s “Washington bureau chief that anyone in the Bush administration had discussed Plame with her.” Then there’s her close “alliance” with Libby:
[S]ome of her colleagues and others said her relationship with Libby appeared too cozy.
They noted that Miller told how Libby asked her for an autographed copy of her book on biological weapons. And they were upset that Miller agreed to Libby’s request to be identified as “a former Hill staffer” instead of “a senior administration official.” …
Such an identification would have allowed Libby to take potshots at Plame without identifying the true source of the attacks. (LAT)
So Miller, as I’ve suspected, lied to her bosses and colleagues, and probably lies to everyone (except maybe her dog). But then there’s Scooter Libby, an avocational fiction writer, who exhibits the dissembling patter of a sociopath:
According to attorneys familiar with his testimony, Libby told the grand jury that … he told Miller that Plame had something to do with Wilson’s being sent on a controversial CIA-sponsored mission to Africa, but that he did not know that Wilson’s wife worked for the CIA or anything else …
However, Miller testified and turned over notes … that showed that Libby had told her that Plame worked for the CIA’s Weapons, Intelligence, Non-Proliferation, and Arms Control office. […]
Libby and Miller’s two-hour breakfast at the St. Regis Hotel in Washington, D.C., on July 8. Libby has told federal investigators, according to legal sources familiar with his testimony, that he told Miller … he had heard that Wilson’s wife had played a role in Wilson’s being selected for the Niger assignment. But Libby also testified that he never named Plame nor told Miller that she worked for the CIA, because either he did not know that at the time, or, if he had heard that Plame was a CIA employee, he did not know whether it was true. (“Waas)
We’re supposed to believe Libby told Miller that Wilson’s wife was involved in the Niger trip but he didn’t tell Miller that Plame worked for the CIA or even her name?
But — where’s the Excedrin? — what if Libby’s version is truer than Miller’s? (Or — don your tinfoil hats — what if it was Miller who told Libby about Valerie Plame’s identity?)
There’s this disturbing section on how Miller “interpreted” what Floyd Abrams, the NYT’s in-house counsel and a fame First Amendment attorney, told her … BELOW:
Joe and Valerie Plame Wilson have lined up Christopher Wolf [PHOTO LEFT], a top attorney in D.C., to prepare “to file a civil lawsuit against the Bush administration officials who disclosed her identity and scuttled her career,” 
