Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald issued a correction today of his filing last week. Apparently Scooter Libby didn’t actually say that he’d been told to tell Judith Miller of the New York Times that a key judgment of the National Intelligence Estimate had been that Iraq was “vigorously trying to produce uranium.” You can read Fitzgerald’s letter here.
Why’s this a big deal? Because that finding wasn’t a key judgment. So Libby would have been lying if he’d said that. The NY Times, relying on Fitgerald’s version of Libby’s testimony, wrote a piece pointing that out.
The original filing read: “[Libby] understood that he was to tell Miller, among other things, that a key judgment of the NIE held that Iraq was ‘vigorously trying to procure’ uranium.'”
But Fitzgerald has amended the sentence to read: “[Libby] understood that he was to tell (then-New York Times reporter Judith) Miller, among other things, some of the key judgments of the NIE (National Intelligence Estimate), and that the NIE stated that Iraq was ‘vigorously trying to procure’ uranium.” (my emphasis)
So I guess you can subtract one data point of mendacity from the administration leading up to war.
