House of Eratosthenes

Everyone agrees that Fitzgerald’s perjury case against Libby hung on the testimony of NBC’s Tim Russert. Libby said that he heard about Plame from Russert. Russert said he had never discussed it. The jury members who have spoken said they believed Russert.

And why should they not? Russert is a perfectly honest man who would not lie. He was undoubtedly giving his best recollection.

But he is not the pope. Given that so many journalists and administration figures were shown to have extremely fallible memories, is it possible that Russert’s memory could have been faulty?

I have no idea. But we do know that Russert once denied calling up a Buffalo News reporter to complain about a story. Russert later apologized for the error when he was shown the evidence of a call he had genuinely and completely forgotten.

There is a second instance of Russert innocently misremembering. He stated under oath that he did not know that one may not be accompanied by a lawyer to a grand jury hearing. This fact, in and of itself, is irrelevant to the case, except that, as former prosecutor Victoria Toensing points out, the defense had tapes showing Russert saying on television three times that lawyers are barred from grand jury proceedings.

This demonstration of Russert’s fallibility was never shown to the jury. The judge did not allow it. He was upset with the defense because it would not put Libby on the stand — his perfect Fifth Amendment right — after hinting in the opening statement that it might. He therefore denied the defense a straightforward demonstration of the fallibility of the witness whose testimony was most decisive.

The Right Coast entry raises yet another interesting point.

I haven’t followed the Libby trial that closely, but one aspect of the verdict did occur to me: How is it that Scooter Libby is facing jail time and Sandy Berger got off with a slap of the wrist. At least part of the answer is that Libby was investigated by a special prosecutor, while Berger was not. My guess is that there is more to the story of Berger as well (incompetence at Justice?)

Um…come to think of it, I heard an awful lot of pious pontificating and hand-wringing from our liberals, both famous and otherwise, about “national security” with the “outing of a foreign op” and so forth. I wonder what they think about national security when the subject shifts to Sandy Pants. Maybe not much…and perhaps this is due to a combination of factors, dealing with their desire to “win” one for ~~America~~ Liberalism, and just plain ignorance — can’t call it anything else — about the facts of the Berger-Pants scandal.

The more we learn about Sandy Berger’s brilliant career as a document thief, the clearer it becomes that there is plenty we still don’t know and may never learn. On Tuesday, the House Government Reform Committee released its report on Mr. Berger’s pilfering of classified documents from the National Archives.

The committee’s 60-page report makes it clear that Mr. Berger knew exactly what he was doing and knew that what he was doing was wrong. According to interviews with National Archives staff, Mr. Berger repeatedly arranged to be left alone with highly classified documents by feigning the need to make personal phone calls, and he used those moments alone with the files to stuff them in his pockets and briefcase.

One incident is particularly suggestive. By his fourth and final visit to review documents and prepare for testimony before the 9/11 Commission, the Archives staff had grown suspicious of how Mr. Berger was handling the documents, so they numbered each one he was given in pencil on the back of the document. When one of them–No. 217–was apparently removed from the files by Mr. Berger, the staff reprinted a copy and replaced it for his review. According to the report, Mr. Berger then proceeded to slip the second copy “under his portfolio also.” In other words, he stole the same document twice.

National security huh? We’re just really, really super-concerned about it, and nobody’s above the law?

I’m not the first one to group these two incidents together, and swivel my head quizzically toward the liberals with a cocked eyebrow to see how they handle the juxtaposition. In fact, I’ve watched it happen often enough to glean a pattern out of the liberals’ reaction. It’s a bubbling stewpot of subject-changing, theatrical indignation, name-calling and sarcasm. Not much else.

Certainly no rational explanation as to why Scooter’s looking at years of laundry-folding, and Sandy Pants is as free as you and me.

and with that, you win my “Quote of the Week”

Not that I award such an award to anyone often.
- philmon | 03/12/2007 @ 16:56

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Pardon Me?Sunday, March 11th, 2007

Pardon Me?
Sunday, March 11th, 2007