Informed Speculation

I’m sure I’ll update this one a few times throughout the afternoon, too.  Here’s a paraphrase of juror Dennis Collins from Jeralyn Merritt:

“I am not excited to be here,” but because he was a reporter for years, he felt he should speak. Will talk about the evidence. The primary thing that convinced us on most counts was the alleged conversation with Russert. It was either false, or if it did happen, Mr. Libby saying he was surprised to hear about Mrs. Wilson didn’t add up. We had lots of post-it notes, we took a week just to get these building blocks, and we came up with that Mr. Libby was told about Mrs. Wilson 9 times. Mr. Hannah’s testimony was contradictory on Libby’s memory. References Marc Grossman’s testimony and Vice-President Cheney’s notes.

There was a lot of sympathy on the jury for Libby. What are we doing with him? Where’s Rove, where’s these other guys? It seemed like as Wells said, he was the fall guy. The jury believed he was tasked by the Vice President to talk to reporters. We never discussed what Cheney would have told him to say.

Was he covering for the VP? We didn’t discuss it because it wasn’t in front of us. Opinion had very little to do with it, the facts were right in front of us. We took every count and went back over all the testimony, we reviewed motive, believability, state of mind.

We didn’t do a straw vote right away. There was too much. Re: Cooper. There was confusion by someone about whether the truth of the statement was the point or whether the issue was whether he had said that. (note: someone, not some people, indicating one juror.)

The Cooper false statement count: His version vs. Mr. Libby’s version. The evidence that he had said “I heard that too” was not in his story that day. He had nothing in his notes about it. They had a reasonable doubt about how he typed the sentence.

He thought Tim Russert was very credible.

The vote was 11 to 0. (Later he says, 9 to 2 on Cooper count at first.)

Some jurors felt sympathetic towards Judith Miller. They though she seemed nice and got “ragged on.”

The great Tom Maguire:

My three of five prediction fell short.  And Raw Story readers may find me to be not-so-eerily prescient:

But Maguire doesn’t predict complete vindication for Cheney’s former aide, Libby.

“As to Libby’s broad story of ‘I forgot, and was surprised when I learned it from Russert,’ my hunch is that the jurors won’t buy it, but that may be my natural pessimism,” Maguire said, adding that “I don’t think any serious observer believes he [Fitzgerald] will get convictions on all five counts.”

Maguire doesn’t completely buy Libby’s “I forgot” story, and believes that it’s possible that the former vice president aide was just trying to keep his boss’s involvement hidden.

“Personally, I think the single most probable scenario is that Libby uhh, shaded his testimony to keep Cheney out of the story,” Maguire says.

Let’s be clear – when the Yankees lose, I am both disappointed and surprised; today I am disappointed.

With the hat tip to Tom Maguire, we see that the George Soros-funded Left Wing Noise Machine site Media Matters is already furiously spinning:

• No underlying crime was committed. Since a federal grand jury indicted Libby in October 2005, numerous media figures have stated that the nature of the charges against him prove that special counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald’s investigation of the CIA leak case found that no underlying crime had been committed. But this assertion ignores Fitzgerald’s explanation that Libby’s obstructions prevented him — and the grand jury — from determining whether the alleged leak violated federal law.
• There was no concerted White House effort to smear Wilson. In his October 2005 press conference announcing Libby’s indictment, Fitzgerald alleged that, in 2003, “multiple people in the White House” engaged in a “concerted action” to “discredit, punish, or seek revenge against” former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV. In August 2006, it came to light that then-deputy secretary of State Richard Armitage was the original source for syndicated columnist Robert D. Novak‘s July 14, 2003, column exposing CIA operative Valerie Plame’s identity. Numerous conservative media figures subsequently claimed that this revelation disproved the notion of a “concerted” White House effort to smear Wilson. But to the contrary, David Corn — Washington editor of The Nation and co-author of Hubris (Crown, 2006) the book that revealed Armitage’s role in the leak — noted on his Nation weblog that Armitage “abetted a White House campaign under way to undermine Wilson” and that whether he deliberately leaked Plame’s identity, “the public role is without question: senior White House aides wanted to use Valerie Wilson’s CIA employment against her husband.”
• Libby was not responsible for the leak of Plame’s identity. Some in the media have suggested that because Libby did not discuss former CIA operative Valerie Plame’s identity with Novak — the first journalist to report she worked at the CIA — he is not technically responsible for the leak. But such claims ignore the fact that Libby discussed Plame’s CIA employment with then-New York Times reporter Judith Miller on several occasions prior to the publication of Novak’s column naming Plame as a CIA operative.

Each one of the the things that Media Matters attempts to ‘rebut’ is, in fact, true: there was no underlying crime committed? Well, there certainly wasn’t one brought to trial in the courtroom.  This was about Libby lying to investigators and the grand jury, and not about whether Plame was illegally ‘outed’.

Nor did the trial attempt to discern whether there was a ‘concentrated White House effort’ to smear Joe Wilson.  I note that Karl Rove, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, et al, were not charged with anything, and it was in fact notorious Washington gossip Richard Armitage who leaked Plame’s identity, whether she was covert or not.

Let’s be clear about one thing – Media Matters is a site for hacks run by hacks.  It has no credibility, and it is demonstrably off the mark here…