Until Now, We Thought Lying Was One of the Few Things They Did Well

The starkest - perhaps dumbest - lie that Scooter Libby told investigators into the CIA Leak case involved a conversation he had with NBC’s Tim Russert. On or around July 10, 2003. Libby placed the call to complain about something a reporter had said on MSNBC. According to Russert’s later recollection, Libby’s complaint was the only subject they discussed that day.

When Libby was questioned by investigators about his phone call with Russert, he told the story differently. In his fictional version, it was during this call that Libby first learned that Joe Wilson’s wife worked for the CIA.

We can assume (can’t we?) that Libby was not speaking on background when he called Russert to complain about a reporter. The contents of a conversation like that can’t possibly be confidential, can they?

Libby had to know that the investigators would compare his account with Russert’s. What an amazingly stupid lie.

So here’s one for the trivia books of the future: The reporter in question was probably MSNBC’s Chris Matthews. Matt Crowley at the National Review Online did a Nexis search and came up with a likely bit of analysis in which Matthews accuses Scooter Libby of rigging the president’s State of the Union speech with disinformation about Saddam’s nuclear program. From “Hardball,” on July 8, 2003:

MATTHEWS: Just to recap, here’s what we know. Joe Wilson, a former ambassador in the United States government, was sent to Niger to establish there whether there was in fact an arms deal for nuclear materials between Saddam Hussein and the government of Niger. He came back and reported back to the CIA at the behest of the vice president’s office, that there was no such deal. That office of the vice president, whoever is in there, Scooter Libby on down, or the vice president himself, never told the president that there was nothing to that, that that was a dry hole story. And yet, the president went on television, telling the American people it was true. Somebody’s to blame here, and it’s a very high level and it’s not speculation.

We now know that Chris’s guesswork was wrong. The vice president did not send Joe Wilson to Africa. The CIA sent Wilson in response to an inquiry from Mr. Cheney about a report that Sadddam was known to be in the market for uranium from Niger. When Matthews gets going - such as anytime he’s discussing either of the Clintons - he goes over the top. Crowley suggests that Libby didn’t like being on the receiving end of it - especially when parts of his “not speculation” were not true:

Libby apparently didn’t take kindly to Matthews’s analysis. So he decided to play some hardball of his own by calling Russert to carp about Matthews. Little did Libby know what a self-destructive act it would be. According to Fitzgerald’s indictment, Libby would later tell the grand jury that Russert had asked him if he knew him Joe Wilson’s wife worked at the CIA, and that Russert said that “all the reporters know it.” Libby also told the grand jury this was all news to him at the time. According to Fitzgerald, those three statements were all lies.