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New Court Filing: Libby Got OK from Bush to Leak to Miller



By E&P Staff

Published: April 06, 2006 11:00 AM ET
NEW YORK Former White House aide I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby testified to a grand jury that he gave information from a National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq to New York Times reporter Judith Miller in 2003 with the specific permission of President Bush, according to a new court filing from the special prosecutor in the case.

This information was first published by The New York Sun earlier today. E&P has now examined the 39-page filing in PDF form.

"The court papers from the prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald, do not suggest that Mr. Bush violated any law or rule," the Sun's Josh Gerstrein observes. "However, the new disclosure could be awkward for the president because it places him, for the first time, directly in a chain of events that led to a meeting where prosecutors contend the identity of a CIA employee, Valerie Plame, was provided to a reporter."

In a court filing late Wednesday responding to requests from Libby's attorneys for government records that might aid his defense, Fitzgerald wrote about the July 8, 2003, meeting: "Defendant testified that he was specifically authorized in advance of the meeting to disclose the key judgments of the classified NIE to Miller on that occasion because it was thought that the NIE was 'pretty definitive' against what Ambassador Wilson had said and that the vice president thought that it was 'very important' for the key judgments of the NIE to come out."

Libby testified that "at first" he rebuffed Cheney's suggestion to release the information because the estimate was classified. However, according Libby, Cheney subsequently said he received an okay for the release directly from Bush. "Defendant testified that the vice president later advised him that the president had authorized defendant to disclose the relevant portions of the NIE," the filing said.