Libby and Cheney will not testify in CIA leak case
Lewis “Scooter” Libby abandoned plans to testify in his own defence and decided against calling his former boss, Vice President Dick Cheney, to help defend him in the CIA leak trial.
The announcement in US District Court by defence attorney Theodore Wells came after several days in which Libby’s lawyers had inched in that direction.
The formal reversal in their announced tactics prompted Judge Reggie Walton to advise them the decision would limit how far they could go in using memory flaws as Libby’s defence to perjury and obstruction charges.
Defense lawyers put in nearly two hours of testimony Tuesday from Cheney’s current national security adviser, John Hannah, about how busy Libby was in 2003 with the war in Iraq and other pressing national security issues while serving Cheney as both national security adviser and chief of staff.
Informed of Libby’s decision, Walton said, “I understood the defence was going to be that these issues were of such significance that they so overwhelmed him so it was reasonable for him to forget
” when he first learned that war critic Joseph Wilson’s wife, Valerie Plame, worked for the CIA.
