RUSH: A juror is speaking, and he said we had a lot of sympathy for Libby, and a lot of jurors were saying, ?What are we doing with this guy? Where’s Rove? Where’s Cheney? What are we doing with this guy?? The juror speaking right now, by the way, said he’s a former reporter. Ha-ha-ha.
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RUSH: Well, the Libby verdict is in: guilty on four of the five counts, a maximum jail time of 25 years. The juror that is speaking to the media right now is a former reporter. He is a journalist. His name is Denis [sic] Collins, and he has written a book, and the title of his book is ?Spying: The Secret History of History.? He’s saying some very interesting things to the media questioning him about how they arrived at their verdicts. Among the most interesting to me was when he said that the jury, ?We gotta tell you, we, the jury, had sympathy for Mr. Libby. We think he was the fall guy. A lot of jurors are saying, ?What are we doing with this guy? Where’s Rove? Where’s Cheney??? Denis Collins also cites the Joe Wilson column, the op-ed that he wrote in the New York Times when he got back from his bogus trip to Niger looking for yellow cake uranium, ostensibly being purchased or sought for purchase by the Iraqis for their reconstituted nuclear program.
I was telling Mr. Snerdley during the break: It is just stunning to me — and it ought not be, but in a court of law it remains stunning to me — how there can be two such widely divergent versions of the truth. Anybody who has spent any time on this at all knows that Joe Wilson was
This might be an interesting way or a good way of explaining it. You have people in this country, and I’ve mentioned this before, who watch one newscast a day. It’s the Nightly News on whatever network, ABC, CBS, and NBC, and that’s all the news they get. You have other people who only read the New York Times, and whatever is in it is gospel. You have other people who only read the Washington Post, and whatever is in it is gospel. We conservatives on the other hand, we read the New York Times and we read the Washington Post to find out their take on things. There are many people on the left — and look at your average journalist. Your average journalist looks at conservative media as some sort of stepchild of inconvenience that they have to put up with, but they make no effort to understand it.
They make no effort to understand the point of view that conservatives have. They have these preconceived notions, their little stories, and the stories are written often before they go to press, and everything is reported in such a way as to confirm what the agenda and the original thought is. There’s no real quest for truth because they don’t think that there’s any truth other than their own innate belief systems. Citing Joe Wilson here as a source with veracity and credibility is just obscene, ladies and gentlemen. Plus, this guy is a journalist! That tells us all we need to know. When he comes out and says there was sympathy for Mr. Libby, ?Gee, what are we doing with this guy? Where’s Rove? Where’s Cheney?? This guy actually said, “We looked at Libby as the fall guy.” What that means is that this jury from the get-go believed that the administration had committed criminal acts in trying to discredit Joe Wilson by supposedly outing his wife, Valerie Plame, which was not what this case was about.
When the jurors start asking, “Where’s Rove and where’s Cheney?” then you know full well they’re not dealing with full attention to the charges here of whether Scooter Libby lied to the FBI and obstructed justice and this sort of thing. I haven’t been able to see or hear everything this juror is saying, so I say this reserving the right to revise my remarks down the road, but it does seem to me here that we have a Martha Stewart-type conviction where she was convicted by the jury for things she wasn’t charged with. She was charged with lying, too, and actually when you listen to those jurors when they came out and talked about her trial, it was clear that they got her for what they thought was insider trading, doing things that big people can do that little people can’t. Typical class envy victory. Same situation here.
It appears to me, when they say Libby was the fall guy, it means they accepted from the get-go the premise that this administration set out — even though it was Richard Armitage who leaked to a bunch of people that Valerie Plame worked at the CIA and was Joe Wilson’s wife, this jury bought hook, line, and sinker the notion that the administration sought — to destroy her career and Libby is the fall guy for this, which is not what this case is about. But then you go back to the initial press conference of the independent counsel, Patrick Fitzgerald, in announcing the Libby indictment. He goes on and on and on and on about how the identity of CIA agents is crucial to the safety of the country and da-da-da-da-da, knowing all the while that it was Richard Armitage! When he indicted Libby, he knew all the while that it was Armitage who had done that, that this was not Libby; that it was not anybody in the administration; that this was not Rove.
Then he gives this flowery speech which, no doubt, was reported. Then the Drive-By Media and the cable outlets at night continued to hype the fact that this was all about the war in Iraq and Bush getting us there under false premises and therefore the real charges in this case were a bait-and-switch.
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RUSH: We got a call earlier in the program from somebody asking me my thoughts on a Bush pardon for Scooter Libby. I said don’t look for a pardon any time soon. If there is a pardon, it will not happen ’til Bush is on his way out the door of the Oval Office. But moments after the guilty verdict was made public, Dingy Harry, the Senate majority leader, called on President Bush to
Joe Wilson implied that Dick Cheney sent him to Niger. Dick Cheney did not. The vice president sent Wilson nowhere. When they found out Wilson had gone to Niger, the White House said, ?Who is this guy?? He comes back and he writes this op-ed in the New York Times. It’s full of untruths. They said, ?Who is this guy? What happened? We didn’t send this guy.? He’s out there saying that he was. It turns out Wilson was lying about that. This came out in court. His wife recommended him to the CIA, who sent him — and why would they send him? For what reason? There’s so much going on here that people don?t understand. But for Dingy Harry to say that “somebody in the administration has been held accountable for manipulating intelligence and discrediting war critics”? Manipulating intelligence? Bill Clinton spelled out the same Saddam Hussein threats in 1998 and the Drive-By Media went right along with it back then, as did the Democrats in the Senate and many of the Republicans.
What Bill Clinton said in 1998 and what the Drive-By Media wrote, is no different than what George W. Bush and the CIA were saying and Colin Powell himself in 2002 about all this. There was no manipulation of intelligence, and if there was it certainly wasn’t on trial here. What makes war critics sacrosanct, Dingy Harry? What is it about war critics that protects them from criticism, especially when they’re lying through their teeth? What is it? Are administrations now immune from response? Are they not allowed to reply to critics who are lying about them? It?s what Dingy Harry wants us to believe. He then said, ?Lewis Libby has been convicted of perjury, but his trial revealed deeper truths about Vice President Cheney’s role in this sordid affair. Now President Bush must pledge not to pardon Libby for his criminal conduct.?
We have some audio sound bites. Here’s the Chris Matthews bite again. It’s right along the lines here of what Dingy Harry is saying. So we have a coordinated message, although it doesn’t need to be coordinated because these people coordinated it a long time ago. But when Dingy Harry says that the administration has been held accountable for the campaign to manipulate intelligence and discredit war critics, he’s essentially saying Bush lied. He manipulated intelligence to get us into war, and that’s what the trial was about. Here’s Chris Matthews with his analysis of this verdict shortly after it was handed down.
MATTHEWS: This is all about the war in Iraq. Of course, it’s a perjury case, but to limit itself to the legal aspects is to limit the Alger Hiss case of 1950 — that great Cold War spy case — to the simple matter of perjury. This is not about perjury. It’s about the larger question of how we got into this war with Iraq and the case that was made by the vice president and his chief of staff that we faced a nuclear threat from Saddam Hussein.
RUSH: Here’s Scooter Libby’s attorney Ted Wells’ reaction to the verdict.
WELLS: We are very disappointed in the verdict of the jurors. This juror deliberated for approximately ten days. Despite our disappointment in the jurors’ verdict, we believe in the American justice system, and we believe in the jury system. We intend to file a motion for a new trial, and if that is denied, we will appeal the conviction, and we have every confidence that ultimately Mr. Libby will be vindicated. We believe, as we said at the time of his indictment, that he is totally innocent, totally innocent, and that he did not do anything wrong. And we intend to keep fighting to establish his innocence. That is all we will have to say at this time.
RUSH: We have a couple bites here from the juror, Denis Collins, who, again, is a journalist and author of a book entitled ?Spying: The Secret History of History.? How does the defense let this guy on the jury? Maybe they’d run out of challenges. Anyway, we have two bites from Libby juror, author and journalist, Denis Collins.
COLLINS: There was a tremendous amount of sympathy for Mr. Libby on the jury. It was said a number of times, ?What are we doing with this guy here? Where’s Rove? Where’s…? You know, where are these other guys?? We’re not saying we didn’t think Mr. Libby was guilty of the things we found him guilty of, but that it seemed like he was — to put it in Mr. Wells point, he was — the fall guy.
RUSH: That’s something that the defense tried at the outset of this case, let’s not forget. They didn’t make much of it after the opening arguments. In the opening arguments the defense tried to say that Libby was being cast aside by the administration, because they knew that they had a DC jury here, and the likelihood is that a bunch of people from DC on a jury are going to be Bush-haters. They’re going to be administration haters, and so they were trying to set Libby up as a fall guy and so forth. They didn’t go back to it after that, didn’t talk about it much beyond opening arguments. Libby was not on the stand. But clearly, clearly the jury saying, ?Where’s Rove? Where are these other guys? What are we doing with this guy here?? They clearly thought this was about something totally other than whether somebody had lied under oath.
Remember, there was no charge about outing a CIA “agent.” There was no charge outing a
COLLINS: Hearing from Cheney, I think it would have been interesting. I’m not sure what it would have done. I don’t have any idea what he would have said, but it was sort of like… You know, we never… I don’t remember ever discussing like, “Wow, are we going to get to see…?” I thought when Wells made his opening and he suddenly hit us with that, you know, it’s the White House and people in the White House who are setting him up, I was thinking, “Wow, maybe we’ll get to see President Bush here.”
RUSH: You gotta be kidding. You got to be kidding! He didn’t say that. Tell me I just didn’t hear a juror say that they expected the president of the United States to show up as a witness in a court trial. Tell me I didn’t hear that. I did hear it? Yes, you heard it, too. We all heard it. I’m sad, folks. This is very sad. I hate losing to these guys who are lying through their teeth about things. It?s just very sad. I gotta take a break here and wallow here in my very sadness.
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RUSH: So this juror, Denis Collins, journalist and author of book about spying, says it sucked. It basically sucks. We wish we weren’t judging Libby. Where are these other guys? Where’s Rove and these other guys? Now, if I’m Ted Wells, the defense attorney, and you know that they’re rolling tape on this juror, and they’re going to have transcripts, “We had sympathy for Mr. Libby. We wish we weren’t sitting here judging this poor guy. This sucks, but we gotta do our job.”