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 News from Around the Americas | October 2005 
Lewis "Scooter" Libby Resigns After Indictment
 John Solomon & Pete Yost - Associated Press
| | I. Lewis "Scooter' Libby Jr., was charged Friday with obstruction of justice, perjury and making false statements in the CIA leak investigation. (Photo: Doug Mills / The New York Times) |
Washington - The vice president's chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter' Libby Jr., was charged Friday with obstruction of justice, perjury and making false statements in the CIA leak investigation, a politically charged case that will throw a spotlight on President Bush's push to war. Libby resigned and left the White House.
Karl Rove, Bush's closest adviser, escaped indictment Friday but remained under investigation, his legal status a continuing political problem for the White House.
The grand jury indictment charged Libby, 55, with one count of obstruction of justice, two of perjury and two false statement counts. If convicted on all five, he could face as much as 30 years in prison and $1.25 million in fines.
The charges stem from a two-year investigation by special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald into whether Rove, Libby or any other administration officials knowingly revealed the identity of CIA officer Valerie Plame or lied about their involvement to investigators.
Libby is accused of lying about how and when he learned about Plame's identity in 2003 and told reporters about it. The information on the officer was classified.
He is also accused of lying when he told Fitzgerald's investigators that he learned about Plame's CIA status from Tim Russert of NBC. He learned it from several government sources, including Cheney, the indictment says.
Any trial would dig into the secret deliberations of Bush and his team as they built the case for war against Iraq.
Bush ordered US troops to war in March 2003, saying Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction program posed a grave and immediate threat to the United States. No such weapons were found. The US military death toll climbed past 2,000 this week.
Libby submitted his resignation to White House chief of staff Andy Card. It was accepted and Libby left the White House. Card notified Bush.
The indictment alleges that Libby began digging for details about Joseph Wilson, Plame's husband and an Iraq war critic, well before the former ambassador went public July 6, 2003, in a newspaper opinion piece with his criticism of the Bush administration's use of faulty prewar intelligence on Iraq's nuclear ambitions.
Libby made his first inquiries about Wilson's travel to Niger in late May 2003 -- a trip the government sent him on in early 2002 to check on reports that Saddam was trying to buy uranium -- and by June 11 Libby was informed by a CIA official that Wilson's wife worked for the agency and might have sent Wilson on the trip.
On June 12, 2003, the indictment alleges, Libby heard directly from Cheney that Plame worked for the spy agency.
"Libby was advised by the vice president of the United States that Wilson's wife worked at the CIA in the counterproliferation division. Libby understood that the vice president had learned this information from the CIA," Fitzgerald said in a news release.
A short time later, Libby began reaching out to reporters, starting with The New York Times' Judith Miller on June 23. |
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