The "Some Other Dude Did It" Defense of I. Lewis Libby

Two presiding deities -- and lively ghosts they are -- continue to hover over the present administration: Vietnam and Watergate. Though the competition between them is fierce, this week Watergate suddenly surged to the fore as the Washington Post's Bob Woodward, famed investigative reporter turned imperial "stenographer" for the Bush administration, crashed and burst into distinctly Judy-Miller-esque flames. Even Woodward's blurry account of his testimony for Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald had a taste of Millerdom to it. It's interesting, by the way, that he thought to offer an "apology" to his Washington Post colleagues and boss, but not to the Post's readers who might wonder why the supposed greatest reporter of our times swallowed the first Plame leak the way a cat might a canary and later went out on the hustings claiming there was little significance to the case. On Larry King Live ("When the story comes out, I'm quite confident we're going to find out that it started kind of as gossip, as chatter...") and National Public Radio ("When I think all of the facts come out in this case, it's going to be laughable because the consequences are not that great…"), he dissed the case, while referring to Fitzgerald as "a junkyard-dog prosecutor." It's quite a sordid little tale. So prepare yourself for another perfect storm of newspaper and blogging criticism over the sad fate of the mainstream media and our -- until recently -- less than investigative press.

Libby's defense team should be careful what it hopes for, because the real facts don't help Libby at all. Woodward's recent disclosure merely adds another senior administration official to the already large group who were obviously working with Libby to distract the public from a truth the administration had already fessed up to -- that the President had made an entirely unsubstantiated claim about an Iraqi search for uranium from Niger in his State of the Union Address. It's not that "some other dude did it" or that "some other dude did it first." The more the real facts about smearing and deception by senior administration officials come out, the more obvious it is that lots of them did it -- and Patrick Fitzgerald shows no signs of folding up his tent and departing. In the meantime, the SODDI defense is likely to prove not only unhelpful to Libby but a potential disaster for the Bush administration, sweeping yet more people into the case.