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Nbc russert rebuts libby testimony { February 7 2007 } Original Source Link: (May no longer be active)
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/07/washington/06cnd-libby.htmlhttp://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/07/washington/06cnd-libby.html
February 7, 2007
NBC’s Russert Rebuts Libby Testimony
By DAVID STOUT
WASHINGTON, Feb. 7 — The television journalist Tim Russert testified today that, contrary to what I. Lewis Libby Jr. has maintained, the two of them never discussed a C.I.A. agent whose unmasking touched off a scandal.
“No, that would be impossible,” Mr. Russert said when the prosecutor, Patrick J. Fitzgerald, asked him if he had told Mr. Libby about the agent. It was impossible, Mr. Russert said, because he did not know about the agent at the time of a crucial conversation with Mr. Libby.
Did Mr. Russert tell Mr. Libby that “all the reporters” knew about the agent, asked Mr. Fitzgerald, as Mr. Libby has maintained Mr. Russert told him.
“No,” Mr. Russert said, repeating the same one-word answer to several similar questions from Mr. Fitzgerald, who is trying to prove that Mr. Libby lied to investigators and grand jurors during an inquiry into who leaked the name of the covert agent.
In fact, Mr. Russert said, Mr. Libby called him in July 2003 not to talk about the Central Intelligence Agency, but to complain about a report on MSNBC, a cable unit of NBC. “He was very firm and very direct,” said Mr. Russert, who has been the bureau chief for NBC News since 1989.
Mr. Russert said the crucial exchange with Mr. Libby took place the week he returned to work on Tuesday, July 8, 2003, after a long holiday weekend.
Mr. Russert also testified that he did not learn the identify of the C.I.A. agent until Monday, July 14, when he read it in a column by Robert Novak in The Washington Post. “Wow, look at this,” Mr. Russert said he recalled thinking. “This is big.”
Mr. Russert’s account is potentially very damaging to Mr. Libby, who has testified before a grand jury that he first learned about the agent from Mr. Russert on July 10. He is on trial in Federal District Court here for perjury and obstruction of justice, accused of trying to thwart an F.B.I. investigation into the disclosure of the agent’s name.
Mr. Fitzgerald has played several hours of Mr. Libby’s taped grand jury testimony so jurors could hear Mr. Libby deny under oath that he had any recollection of early conversations about the agent, Valerie Wilson. His account has been contradicted in court by several government officials and journalists.
Mr. Libby’s lawyer, Theodore Wells Jr., sought this afternoon to raise doubts about Mr. Russert’s memory, eliciting from the journalist the acknowledgment that he could not remember the exact day of his telephone exchange with Mr. Libby, the time of day, or the duration of their conversation.
And when Mr. Russert said he recalled only one conversation with Mr. Libby, Mr. Wells pointed out that Mr. Russert told the F.B.I. in the fall of 2003 that he remembered “at least one” talk with Mr. Libby.
But Mr. Russert could not be shaken in his account of first learning about the agent on July 14, 2003, after reading the Novak column. “I wish I had known,” Mr. Russert said, “but I didn’t.”
Mr. Russert said he told Mr. Libby, who laced his complaints about the MSNBC report with vulgarities, to contact someone else at NBC after explaining that he had responsibilities for the network’s broadcast news but not the cable programs.
Mr. Russert was on crutches today – the result, he said, of a broken ankle he suffered about 10 weeks ago.
Mrs. Wilson’s identity as a C.I.A. agent was first reported by Mr. Novak shortly after her husband, the former diplomat Joseph C. Wilson IV, wrote an Op-Ed article in The New York Times that angered the Bush White House by asserting that the administration had willfully distorted intelligence about Iraq’s efforts to obtain uranium in Niger.
Mr. Wilson has gone to Africa for the C.I.A. to investigate reports about those efforts. He concluded that there was little substance to the reports.
Mr. Russert’s testimony came after jurors heard Mr. Libby, on an audiotape of his grand jury testimony in March 2004, recall how abandoned he felt in the fall of 2003 amid a swirl of news reports about the investigation into the unmasking of the C.I.A. agent.
At the time, the White House was putting out the message to reporters that Karl Rove, President Bush’s top political adviser, had nothing to do with the leak of the covert agent’s name. But the same message was not being put out about Mr. Libby, then Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff.
“I didn’t think that was fair,” Mr. Libby told the grand jury in March 2004. And so, Mr. Libby recalled in his testimony, he approached Scott McClellan, then the chief White House spokesman, and Andrew H. Card Jr., who was then White House chief of staff.
“I think you ought to be saying something about me too,” Mr. Libby said he told the White House aides.
When the White House message was still not sufficiently exculpatory, in Mr. Libby’s view, he went to see his boss, the vice president, who listened carefully and reacted somewhat cryptically, but at least offered Mr. Libby a measure of support.
The grand jury tapes offered a titillating, occasionally entertaining behind-the-scenes look at the highest levels of the Bush administration.
Mr. Libby said he told the vice president, while both were in Wyoming, that “it was unfair” that the White House had not corrected reports that he had leaked Mrs. Wilson’s name to the columnist Robert Novak, who disclosed it a column in July 2003.
“It should be fixed,” Mr. Libby said he told Mr. Cheney.
“I was not the person who talked to Mr. Novak and leaked this bit,” Mr. Libby is heard to say in a soft, even voice. “You know,” Mr. Libby said he told Mr. Cheney, “I learned this from Tim Russert.”
At that, Mr. Cheney tilted his head. “The Tim Russert part got his attention,” Mr. Libby said.
Although the audiotapes were played by the prosecution, they also recalled -- this time in Mr. Libby’s own voice -- assertions by Mr. Libby’s lawyers in the trial’s opening arguments that their client was made a scapegoat by White House officials determined to protect Mr. Rove at all costs. (Mr. Wilson has said he suspects Mr. Rove of having something to do with disclosing his wife’s identity in revenge for his article in The Times.)
At one point in his grand jury testimony, Mr. Fitzgerald asked Mr. Libby why he was smiling. Because, Mr. Libby replied, a line of questioning had just reminded him that Mr. Cheney did weigh in on his behalf.
“It looks like he was trying to protect me a little bit, which is nice,” Mr. Libby said.
He recalled during their meeting in Wyoming Mr. Cheney saying, “I know you were not the leak, not the source,” and pledging to make the necessary phone calls to the White House publicity machine to that effect.
Later in his conversation with the vice president, though, Mr. Libby recalled telling him that, after his memory was refreshed by looking at internal documents, he concluded he had learned about Mrs. Wilson from from Mr. Cheney himself and not Mr. Russert.
“From me?” Mr. Cheney replied, tilting his head again. After considerably more back-and-forth, Mr. Libby testified, the vice president said, “Fine.”
Then Mr. Cheney raised his hand in a gesture that Mr. Libby said he interpreted as, “You know, we shouldn’t be talking about the details of this.”
Recalling the events of that autumn of 2003, Mr. Libby noted that he was giving a true account “if memory serves -- and it doesn’t always.”
Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company
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