Earth to Scooter: It's About Lying

In a ruling missed by many of the big boys because it was announced late on Friday, a federal judge has ruled that I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby's forthcoming perjury trial will be about . . . perjury.

Lawyers for Libby, Vice President Cheney's indicted former chief of staff, were pursuing a See What Sticks strategy, as in "throw everytthing up against the wall and see what sticks," and had been asking for documents having little or nothing to do with the charge that he lied to the Wilson-Plame leak grand jury.

The documents included those relating to former ambassador Joseph Wilson's infamous trip to Niger, where he put the lie to the Bush administration's contention that Saddam Hussein was trying to buy uranium from the African country.

Wrote U.S. District Judge Reggie B. Walton:

. . . the only question the jury will be asked to resolve in this matter will be whether the defendant intentionally lied when he testified before the grand jury and spoke with FBI agents about statements he purportedly made to the three news reporters concerning Ms. Wilson’s employment. The prosecution of this action, therefore, involves a discrete cast of characters and events, and this Court will not permit it to become a forum for debating the accuracy of Ambassador Wilson’s statements, the propriety of the Iraq war or related matters leading up to the war, as those events are not the basis for the charged offenses. At best, these events have merely an abstract relationship to the charged offenses.

Not a good sign for Scooter, eh?