Rebutting The Monsignor

by digby

Most lefty bloggers have been writing about this Plame story for years now, but it really took fire after the revelations about Karl Rove’s potential involvement in July of 2005. I went back today to look at some of my commentary from that period and this stuck out:

…did Scooter just blurt out Tim Russert’s name without thinking? If he lied about the Monsignor he was making a grave error. There aren’t many media figures in Washington who are viewed with any reverence anymore, but he’s one of them, as sad a comment as that is.

It’s a fatal error to get into a he said/she said with a guy like him — if there’s a trial, Russert’s the guy who will be believed.

(As it turned out, Scooter didn’t just blurt it out. They thought that hiding behind the reporters’ privilege was a pretty nifty plan and like all their nifty plans, it failed.)

Turns out that the Russert testimony actually was pivotal,as predicted way back when, according to Dennis Collins, the juror who spoke to the media:

“the primary thing which convinced us on most of the accounts was the conversation… the alleged conversation… with Tim Russert…”

Even though Russert admitted on the stand that he granted all government officials blanket anonymity unless they told him the conversation was on the record — the exact opposite of what one would assume went on with an allegedly adversarial press — Russert nonetheless brought with him the credibility and celebrity of NBC News and “Meet The Press.” He’s as close as we have to Walter Cronkite (God help us) and him being on the stand saying Libby lied would be a very difficult thing for any defendent to rebut. Like it or not, he’s the guy people trust in all this.

Update: As noted in the comments, “he said/she said” was not, of course, the crux of Fitzgerald’s case. His proof lay in the fact that Libby had been told by multiple people that Wilson’s wife worked for the CIA before he talked to Russert as well as the fact that Russert claimed he never told Libby anything about Plame’s wife.

Still, when you hang your hat on Tim Russert being the liar, it’s a tough sell to a jury. He’s the famous newsman, Scooter is just a faceless partisan who works for Dick Cheney. I’m not saying it’s right, I’m just saying it’s the way things work.

Update II: Michael Wolff has an interesting (if erroneous in some respects) take on the Libby trial in this month’s Vanity Fair, here.

.