Um, I forgot 7 people talked of spy - Libby

BY JAMES GORDON MEEK
DAILY NEWS WASHINGTON BUREAU

WASHINGTON - Borrowing a defense used by tax evaders and schoolkids who don't do their homework, Vice President Cheney's indicted former top adviser told a grand jury he forgot that seven people told him about CIA spy Valerie Plame.
Lewis (Scooter) Libby is charged with lying to FBI agents and a federal grand jury about how he first learned of Plame's identity. Cheney, his boss, was among those who told Libby that an Iraq war critic's wife worked at the CIA, prosecutors allege.

But Libby said in his now-unsealed 2004 testimony that "it seemed to me" he heard about Plame "for the first time" from NBC broadcaster Tim Russert in July 2003.

Russert denies telling Libby that former Ambassador Joseph Wilson's wife was an undercover spy - a disclosure now at the center of a scandal rocking the White House.

On March 5, 2004, a prosecutor asked Libby if it was "fair" to say he knew Plame's CIA identity a month before Russert supposedly revealed it to him.

"I had forgotten it," Libby explained.

Solomon Wisenberg, a lawyer who probed the Monica Lewinsky scandal, said, "Barring some unusual mental condition, to make a claim like that is not likely going to fly."

Libby allegedly discussed Plame with six others besides Cheney in June 2003, including CIA briefer Craig Schmall.

But Libby's lawyers blame any "errors" in his testimony on "confusion, mistake or faulty memory."

In the case of Libby's chats with Cheney about Wilson - such as one after he spoke to Russert - he said, "When I had that conversation I had forgotten about the earlier conversations in which [Cheney] told me ... that the wife worked at the CIA."


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