DC: It’s a Small World, After AllThe Washington Post checks in from the Libby trial. If you lived in DC, though, your sister’s secretary’s car detailer probably told you about it already:
To see just how small a town Washington really is, drop in on jury selection at the trial of I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, where nearly every candidate so far seems to have some connection to the players or events surrounding the leak of an undercover CIA officer’s identity.
There’s the software database manager whose wife works as a prosecutor for the Department of Justice and who counts the local U.S. attorney and a top official in Justice’s criminal division as neighbors and friends. And a housecleaner who works at the Watergate and knows Condoleezza Rice not by her title of secretary of state but as the “lady who lives up on the fifth floor.” And a former Washington Post reporter whose editor was now-Assistant Managing Editor Bob Woodward; he recently lived across the street from NBC’s Tim Russert and just published a book on the CIA and spying.
One guy in particular — anybody know who this is? — takes the cake:
Another candidate, a former Post journalist, seemed to have a link to nearly every key player in the case. He had worked in the paper’s Metro section, he said, where his editor was Woodward, a key defense witness. Until two years ago, he lived across an alley from NBC’s Tim Russert, a star witness for the prosecution. And he had gone to parties with The Post’s Walter Pincus, another defense witness. . . .
Then he noted that one of his best friends plays in an over-40 football league with Libby. And he has heard that Libby “has a great arm.”
Did he mention that he went to grade school with Maureen Dowd, he asked the judge? That would be the New York Times columnist who publicly savaged colleague Judith Miller after some of Miller’s reporting on the Iraq war came to light around the time of the Plame investigation. Miller is a witness for the prosecution.
Never play six degrees with that guy.
