Of course, it’s an unofficial impeachment, but it will also, through its documentation, be inerasable. The trial record—testimony, exhibits, the lot—will be there, in one place, for investigators, scholars, reporters and Congress to pore over. It goes far beyond the charges against Mr. Libby. It is, instead, a road map to the abuses of power that Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney and their shadow government of neoconservatives have committed as the neocons carried out what they had been planning for years: an invasion of Iraq—and other military excursions—for the purpose of expanding American dominion.

From the start, when he was named special prosecutor in late 2003, Mr. Fitzgerald seemed to understand and embrace this much wider significance.

Yet he was careful not to overreach, crafting the indictment of Mr. Libby narrowly: He had lied to a grand jury, and to F.B.I. agents, about leaks he had given his favorite media people to discredit a vocal critic of the war.

The critic was former Ambassador Joseph Wilson. Mr. Wilson, whose diplomatic service had included work in Africa, was asked in 2002 by the C.I.A. to investigate unconfirmed reports that Saddam Hussein had recently tried to purchase 500 tons of yellowcake uranium from Niger to be further refined to produce nuclear weapons.

Mr. Wilson went to Africa, consulted his sources, and found no meaningful evidence of such a plot. He reported these negative findings to the C.I.A. And further investigations by several parties, including the International Atomic Energy Agency, a U.N. body, established that the uranium story was phony. Yet Messrs. Bush, Cheney and others in the President’s close circle kept presenting the uranium story as part of the pressing rationale for a U.S. invasion of Iraq.

Even as the White House found itself apologizing for a January 2003 State of the Union address which continued to tout the uranium story and other known falsehoods about the Iraqi threat, it continued the push for war. The invasion began on March 20, 2003.

Mr. Wilson responded to the White House in a July 6, 2003, Op-Ed article for The New York Times, charging that the administration had manufactured evidence to win support for the war. It was this story, published in the country’s most influential news organ, that drove the White House into a frenzy—in particular Mr. Cheney, the administration’s leading hawk.

The smear campaign against Mr. Wilson and his wife, Valerie Plame, went into high gear. Conservative pundit Robert Novak, a frequent conduit for White House whispers, wrote a column on July 14, 2003, attacking Mr. Wilson and outing Ms. Plame as a C.I.A. “operative.” The trial has since identified one of the unnamed senior administration officials Mr. Novak cited as his sources: Karl Rove, the advisor closest to the President.

The Justice Department responded to calls for an investigation into the leak by naming the U.S. Attorney for Chicago, Mr. Fitzgerald, as special prosecutor for the case.

Whether or not Mr. Fitzgerald gets a conviction, he has created a trial record that establishes the administration's guilt. Sprinkled throughout are the names of most of the neoconservatives who had been planning the current Iraq War ever since the 1991 Gulf War ended with Saddam Hussein still in power.

They came out in the open in 1997 when they formed a Washington think tank of their own—the Project for the New American Century (PNAC). Their first public act was a 1998 letter to President Bill Clinton, calling for the swift “removal of Saddam Hussein’s regime.”

Citing those still-undiscovered “weapons of mass destruction,” they said: “[W]e can no longer depend on our partners in the Gulf War coalition … to uphold the [U.N.] sanctions …. ”

Then, in 2000, just before Mr. Bush’s elevation to the White House by the Supreme Court, the PNAC war-seekers issued a lengthy manifesto calling for a major escalation of the country’s military mission. This 81-page document proposed a buildup that would make it possible for the United States to “fight and decisively win multiple, simultaneous major theater wars.” The report depicted these wars as “large scale” and “spread across [the] globe.”

Iraq was named as a major threat.

Another aim of this escalation was as follows: “Control the new ‘international commons’ of space and cyberspace, and pave the way for the creation of a new military service—U.S. Space Forces—with the mission of space control.”

Perhaps the eeriest sentence in the document is found on page 51, conjuring up images of 9/11: “The process of transformation … is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event—like a new Pearl Harbor.” (The PNAC documents can be found online at newamericancentury.org.)

Among the 25 signatories to the PNAC founding statement: Dick Cheney, I. Lewis Libby, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Jeb Bush, Elliott Abrams, Zalmay Khalizad.

Most of these names echo throughout the Libby trial record. Besides the damning notes from Mr. Cheney, accounts of conversations between Mr. Cheney and Mr. Libby and Mr. Libby’s subsequent conversations with other pivotal administration officials, there is at least one document, in Mr. Cheney’s handwriting, that suggests the President had direct knowledge of the campaign to discredit Mr. Wilson.

The trial and its record was always all about the unnecessary war—a war created by massive and deliberate lying about an imminent security threat that wasn’t there. That’s why the President and his men were desperate to shut Mr. Wilson up.

He was the imminent threat—to their delusional empire-building.

The closeness between politicians and the media seems to have come as a surprise to people who thought the two were, if not adversarial, at least at arm’s length. The relaxed, we’re-all-on-the-same-Washington-team modus vivendi is personified in Tim Russert of NBC. In the course of the trial, Mr. Russert let it out that he treats all his conversations with government officials as not-for-attribution backgrounders.

By according news sources anonymity, you get information that you otherwise would never have known about, or so the argument runs—but if you look over Mr. Russert’s career, you will see that he has never broken a big story. And Mr. Russert is hardly the only one in the Washington press pack who hides the names of people supplying news tips.

If it were not for the practice of keeping these names from the public, Mr. Libby would not have been put on trial. Then–Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage was the first person to leak the fact that Mr. Wilson’s wife worked for the C.I.A. He leaked it to Robert Novak, who confirmed the fact with Karl Rove, George Bush’s evil genius in residence. The leaking was engineered as part of a scurvy little plot to discredit Mr. Wilson, but none of this would have happened had Mr. Novak not hidden the names of Mr. Armitage and Mr. Rove.

This was in line with a longstanding practice of cooperating with government officials who want to attack people without letting anyone know who’s doing the attacking. It had already been going on years ago when I served my time as a Washington Post reporter, but both then and now, the promise of confidentiality results in more mischief than it does news.

A journalist who knows the trade will grant confidentiality to a news source about as often as a policeman draws his gun in the line of duty: It should be a rare and exceptional event.

Most news sources are dying to tell you whatever it is that they’re peddling. In most instances, if a reporter explains that he or she doesn’t grant anonymity, the source will tell you anyway—and at least half the time, what they tell you is crap.

It’s true in this case that, had Mr. Armitage and Mr. Rove known that their names would be attached to the story, they wouldn’t have said anything. But the revelation that Mr. Wilson’s wife worked for the C.I.A. wasn’t news; the real news here was that the White House was out to destroy Mr. Wilson, a State Department employee, by suggesting his wife had gotten him a plush assignment abroad. That was the only piece of real news, and it went unreported because of the promise of confidentiality.

By promising everybody and his brother confidentiality, media people have made it more difficult to defend reporters threatened with legal sanctions for refusing to divulge the name of a source. Judy Miller, the ex–New York Times reporter who grew famous printing anonymous cock-and-bull stories about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction, went to jail for months because she refused tell a federal prosecutor that Mr. Libby had unloaded this Wilson-Plame junk on her.

American journalists have been pining for some kind of a federal shield law, but they have never been able to get Congress to see it their way. The Justice Department hates the idea—and, given the low esteem our calling has with the public in general, the chances of getting some kind of protection against bullying U.S. Attorneys is slight. It is made yet slighter by reporters promiscuously promising confidentiality to every Tom, Dick and Harry.

The anonymity game turned comedic when the Army’s propaganda division called a press conference in Baghdad to reveal to the world the actual, real, genuine physical evidence that the Shiite Iranians were, for undisclosed reasons, supplying their Sunni Iraqi enemies with advanced munitions with which to attack Americans. This nonsense, which is not even new nonsense, was delivered—you guessed it—by three anonymous intelligence analysts. Under the rules of the conference, no recording devices were permitted. One wonders if the analysts appeared wearing ski masks.

The reporters should have walked out on such a press conference before it began, and doubtless some of them would have were it not for the fear that their editors, sitting happily behind their desks thousands of miles away from the shooting, would have rebuked them for being scooped on what was self-evidently spurious trash.

Happily, however, exceptions to these observations exist. We have, among others, Seymour Hersh and the McClatchy (formerly Knight-Ridder) newspaper chain, which for the past five years, while others were playing the Washington game, went ahead—unflummoxed and unflimflammed—and got the job done well. Most recently, as The New York Times, our most influential newspaper, was once again in free-fall down Gullibility Gulch, McClatchy readers were being forewarned that the swelling government-sponsored noise about Iranian supplies of improvised explosive devices was shaky and unsubstantiated.

Only so much of the blame can be assigned to reporters. The reporters have bosses who can, if they wish, tell their reporters that they are not to promise anonymity to anyone without first clearing it with their editors. Of course, the bosses could do a lot of things. They could stop assigning reporters to the White House, where they do nothing but waste their days in the pressroom, the journalistic equivalent of being locked up in Guantánamo.

Next to show business, no industry is so addicted to awards than journalism. Yet more are needed—anti-Pulitzers awarded annually to individuals and media organizations for such categories as Most Compliant, Laziest, Most Arrogant, Most Self-Satisfied, Most Inaccurate, and Most Irresponsible. If you have suggestions for other categories, please e-mail them immediately.

There, Ms. Abramson became the latest celebrity journalist to take the stand in the perjury trial of former Vice Presidential aide I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby.

The previous day of the trial leaned heavily on the Pulitzers and included the testimony of several establishment fixtures: The Washington Post’s Walter Pincus and Bob Woodward, Chicago Sun-Times columnist Robert Novak, and The Times’ chief White House correspondent, David Sanger.

Next to them, Ms. Abramson was hardly a star. But for a small segment of the viewing public—the one that became obsessed with The New York Times’ entanglement in the Libby prosecution—her testimony was pretty much the most important.

While Ms. Abramson now currently serves as The Times’ managing editor in New York, it’s her previous job—that of D.C. bureau chief during the tumultuous summer of 2003—that’s pushed her back into the spotlight.

It was in July 2003 that Valerie Plame, wife of former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, was outed as a C.I.A. agent, sparking a chain of events through Washington’s corridors of power up to the current trial.

Judith Miller, a former Times reporter who spent 85 days in prison in 2005 for refusing to testify in the case against Mr. Libby, has said that she wanted to pursue a story about Mr. Libby’s efforts to leak Ms. Plame’s identity, but that Ms. Abramson had turned her down.

Although Ms. Abramson has challenged that assertion publicly, now the defense hoped she would do so under oath.

Dressed in a long black skirt, chocolate brown blazer, and black heels, Ms. Abramson strode past the roughly 50 spectators assembled in the back rows, which included establishment journalists not testifying, like Time’s Joe Klein.

She next moved past Mr. Libby, seated with his half-dozen attorneys, and also past special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald—the man whose dogged efforts led to Ms. Miller’s incarceration in Alexandria, Va.

“I think people will be focusing more on what Jill is going to say than David,” said a Times D.C. bureau staffer shortly after Mr. Sanger’s Feb. 12 testimony, which focused on the notion that Mr. Libby never mentioned the former C.I.A. agent in a July 2003 conversation. However, said a Times D.C. bureau source, Ms. Abramson’s testimony “is a matter of huge concern and speculation.”

And what did Ms. Abramson have to say?

Well, in just four short minutes on the stand, Ms. Abramson didn’t have the opportunity to say much. However, for the defense, the testimony was sought to impugn Ms. Miller.

Ms. Abramson sped through her career’s impressive trajectory, from editor of Legal Times to Wall Street Journal reporter to Washington editor at The Times, and then to bureau chief.

Regarding her interaction with Ms. Miller, Ms. Abramson said that she was not Ms. Miller’s main editor, nor was Ms. Miller a member of the Washington bureau at that time.

Ms. Abramson’s account of that time was that Ms. Miller was doing a companion piece on prewar intelligence, reporting on the “fruitless hunt for W.M.D. in Iraq.”

She was next asked about Mr. Wilson’s July 6 Op-Ed piece in The Times, about his assignment to investigate whether Iraq sought to acquire yellow-cake uranium in Niger.

“It caused a stir,” said Ms. Abramson, who mentioned that The Times subsequently had its own reporters “chasing the story.”

Next: Did Ms. Miller speak to Ms. Abramson about reporting a piece on “whether Joe Wilson’s wife works for the C.I.A.?”

“I have no recollection of such a conversation,” said Ms. Abramson.

Members of the press section started whispering audibly. With that, the defense rested.

Debra Bonamici took over for the prosecution and asked a question that provoked a few chuckles in the press section. At the time in question, he said, had Ms. Abramson “tune[d] out” the reporter?

“It’s possible that I occasionally tuned her out,” Ms. Abramson replied.

Ms. Abramson’s response, then, fell short of her earlier wholesale rebuttal of Ms. Miller’s claim.

The New York Times itself published a piece on Oct. 16, 2005, taking up the question.

The article, headlined “The Miller Case: A Notebook, A Cause, a Jail Cell and a Deal,” written by Don Van Natta Jr., Adam Liptak and Clifford Levy, quoted Ms. Miller and Ms. Abramson thusly:

“Ms. Miller said in an interview that she ‘made a strong recommendation to my editor’ that an article be pursued. ‘I was told no,” she said. She would not identify the editor.

“Ms. Abramson, the Washington bureau chief at the time, said Ms. Miller never made any such recommendation.”

Roughly four minutes had passed since the beginning of her testimony, and Ms. Abramson left the courtroom.

It was the perhaps the shortest testimony in the trial. And in the White House, it might not have meant much. Considering the brevity of Ms. Abramson’s testimony, it’s surprising that her attorneys tried to prevent her from taking the stand.

The Times D.C. bureau had been bracing for something else. Several staffers told The Observer that Ms. Abramson’s testimony could be “painful” if it conjured up the heavily scrutinized journalism of the Times Washington bureau in the run-up to the Iraq War. But that obviously wasn’t on the defense’s agenda, so it never came up.

On Feb. 8, U.S. District Judge Reggie Walton, who is presiding over the case, ruled that Ms. Abramson would have to testify, despite the objections from The Times’ counsel and Washington, D.C., attorney Charles Leeper.

That same day, Ms. Abramson was down in her old D.C. bureau stomping grounds, having met with her attorneys. Mr. Sanger, who had also recently lost his own attempt at fighting a subpoena, said he spoke to Ms. Abramson that day.

But Mr. Sanger’s day on the stand came four days later, the same morning that a piece he co-wrote led the paper, on multilateral talks over North Korea’s nuclear ambitions. Perhaps testifying wasn’t too much of a stain on Mr. Sanger, since he co-wrote the lead story on Feb. 13, too.

Mr. Sanger declined to give specifics, considering that he could get called back to the stand. However, he said of the media-circus atmosphere during the Libby trial: “It clearly gives people a deeper understanding of how we do what we do. I’m not sure that’s all bad.”

For The Times, the upcoming arrival of former Los Angeles Times editor Dean Baquet, the new D.C. bureau chief, has fueled optimism among the staff, despite the dredging-up of old bureau ghosts across town in the court.

But does this put things to rest for The Times?

“The whole Iraq War W.M.D. case has been full of unexpected turns at every moment,” said Mr. Sanger. “I would be foolish to say we’ve heard the last of it.”

The question that now hangs over the President and the Vice President is whether they lied to special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald—the same crime for which their fall guy Scooter now faces possible imprisonment and disgrace. According to published reports, the special counsel interviewed both Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney during the summer of 2004. The only way for them to dispel the suspicion that they may have lied to him is to permit full disclosure of those interviews.

Doubts about the candor of Messrs. Bush and Cheney date all the way back to September 2003, before the appointment of the special counsel, when the President supposedly declared his sincere determination to “get to the bottom of this.”

By “this,” he meant the apparent conspiracy among administration officials to reveal that Ms. Wilson was an undercover C.I.A. officer in an effort to discredit her husband, Joseph C. Wilson IV. A former U.S. ambassador and national-security official, Mr. Wilson had incurred the wrath of the Bush White House by revealing what he knew about the dubious justifications for the invasion of Iraq.

“There’s been nothing—absolutely nothing—brought to our attention to suggest any White House involvement,” said Scott McClellan, then the Presidential press secretary, in attempting to cover Karl Rove and the rest of the White House staff with a blanket exoneration.

We have long since learned otherwise. We know, for instance, that Mr. Rove, Mr. Libby and former Presidential press secretary Ari Fleischer were all involved in leaking Ms. Wilson’s identity to the media. We also know that Mr. Libby, by his own testimony, learned about her C.I.A. identity from the Vice President. They had hoped to discredit Mr. Wilson by hinting at nepotism in his C.I.A.-sponsored trip to Niger to gather information about alleged uranium trading with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. (Actually, he undertook the difficult journey to that unprepossessing nation as a public service, without pay.) In short, we know that top officials in the Bush White House were behind the campaign to discredit the Wilsons.

Where does that leave the President and the Vice President? Over the past several days, the outlines of Mr. Cheney’s role in the nasty attack on the Wilsons and the subsequent cover-up have become increasingly plain. He not only oversaw the activities of his chief of staff, but went so far as to order Mr. McClellan to “clear” Mr. Libby in a press briefing.

That incident came up during the testimony of David Addington, who now holds Mr. Libby’s old job as Vice Presidential chief of staff and was formerly counsel to the Vice President. The defense brought into evidence a note written by Mr. Cheney himself, explaining why he insisted that the White House press staff defend Mr. Libby just as vigorously as Mr. Rove, whom the Vice President seems to have blamed for the exposure of the conspiracy.

The angry note said, “not going to protect one staffer + sacrifice the guy this Pres. asked to stick his head in the meat grinder because of the incompetence of others.” Although Mr. Cheney had crossed out the words “this Pres.” and replaced them with the phrase “that was,” the reference to Mr. Bush remains perfectly legible—and deeply incriminating.

According to published reports, the special prosecutor conducted interviews of the President and the Vice President during the summer of 2004. Those reports indicate that Mr. Bush, accompanied by private counsel, wasn’t placed under oath during his interview. But even if neither he nor Mr. Cheney was sworn during those encounters, that wouldn’t excuse them from telling the truth. To do otherwise would expose them to prosecution for making false statements to federal investigators—a felony—as well as possible counts of conspiracy and obstruction of justice.

Did the President ask Mr. Libby to take the fall for others in the White House? Did the President know the extent of the Vice President’s involvement in the effort to ruin the Wilsons? When did he learn what Messrs. Cheney, Libby, Rove and Fleischer had done to advance that scheme?

Most important, did Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney tell the truth when Mr. Fitzgerald and his investigators interrogated them about those issues? That is the inescapable question at the bottom of this case—and sooner or later, the Congress and the press must demand answers.

NBC should have reported whether its employee, Gregory, agrees with Fleischer's account (According to Fox News, the other reporter, John Dickerson of Time, disputes it).

What Messrs. Corn and Isikoff reveal, among other things, is that the first official to reveal Valerie Wilson’s covert identity as a C.I.A. operative to columnist Robert Novak in June 2003 was Richard Armitage, who then served as Deputy Secretary of State. Unlike other Bush administration figures who were involved in leaking Ms. Wilson’s identity, such as Karl Rove and Lewis (Scooter) Libby, Mr. Armitage was known to be unenthusiastic about the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

From those two facts, numerous pundits and talking heads have deduced that Mr. Rove and Mr. Libby were guiltless, that there was no White House effort to expose Ms. Wilson, and that the entire leak investigation was a partisan witch hunt and perhaps an abuse of discretion by the special counsel, Patrick Fitzgerald. The same pundits now proclaim that Mr. Armitage’s minor role somehow proves the White House didn’t seek to punish Valerie Wilson and her husband, former Ambassador Joe Wilson, for his decision to publicly debunk the Presidential misuse of dubious intelligence from Niger concerning Iraq’s alleged attempts to purchase yellowcake uranium.

But whatever Mr. Armitage did, or says he did, in no way alters what Mr. Rove and Mr. Libby did in the days that followed, nor does it change their intentions. It’s a simple concept—two people or more can commit a similar act for entirely different reasons—but evidently it has flummoxed the great minds of contemporary journalism.

In this instance, Mr. Armitage says he was merely “gossiping” with Mr. Novak, who seems to have been primed to question him about the Wilson affair. But both Mr. Rove and Mr. Libby sought to undermine Joe Wilson’s credibility—and perhaps to victimize him and his wife—by planting information about Valerie Wilson with two reporters. Mr. Rove gave that information to Time reporter Matt Cooper, who got confirmation from Mr. Libby. And Mr. Libby provided the same poisonous tip to New York Times reporter Judith Miller.

Almost from the beginning of his investigation in December 2003, Mr. Fitzgerald has known about the blabby Armitage, who at least came clean promptly. But Mr. Fitzgerald, a Bush appointee of impeccable reputation, understood that the Armitage confession was of limited relevance—and it didn’t discourage the special counsel from conducting a thorough probe that uncovered a secretive, high-level effort, emanating from the office of Vice President Dick Cheney, to discredit Joe Wilson and to use his wife’s two decades of undercover work for her country as a weapon against him. Indeed, the only reason Mr. Armitage knew about Valerie Wilson was that he had read a negative dossier on Joe Wilson prepared at the behest of Mr. Libby.

On his blog, Mr. Corn, the Washington editor of The Nation, recently responded to the opinion-makers who were so eager to misuse his reporting to exonerate the White House. “As Hubris will make clear,” he wrote, “Rove’s leak (to Robert Novak and Matt Cooper) and Libby’s leak (to Judith Miller and Cooper) were part of a campaign to discredit former ambassador Joseph Wilson. That’s no conspiracy theory. The available evidence proves this point.”

According to an article published by Mr. Corn in The Nation on Sept. 5, the available evidence also proves that Valerie Wilson was not only a genuine C.I.A. undercover officer, but that she was in charge of agency operations seeking proof of Iraq’s weapons-of-mass-destruction programs. Specifically, she ran the Joint Task Force on Iraq, which was part of the Counterproliferation Division of the C.I.A.’s Directorate of Operations. She worked overseas, including trips to Jordan and other theatres of operations, using a “nonofficial cover.” By disclosing her identity, the Bush officials ruined her career and endangered the sources and methods she had used in the President’s service. Hubris also suggests strongly that her alleged role in dispatching her husband to Niger has been exaggerated.

All this is quite contrary to the dominant right-wing perspective in Washington. So now we will see whether those who were so thrilled by the Armitage scoop are honest enough to confront more significant and embarrassing facts. But the fundamental issues have not changed.

Rather than confront Mr. Wilson’s accusations directly, the White House went after him and his wife—and then lied about the involvement of its senior officials in disclosing her identity. The perpetrators of these unpatriotic partisan acts have yet to be punished, and the President, as usual, has failed to uphold his own professed ethical standards. It is a simple matter, and yet still too challenging for the national press to understand.

What Messrs. Corn and Isikoff reveal, among other things, is that the first official to reveal Valerie Wilson’s covert identity as a C.I.A. operative to columnist Robert Novak in June 2003 was Richard Armitage, who then served as Deputy Secretary of State. Unlike other Bush administration figures who were involved in leaking Ms. Wilson’s identity, such as Karl Rove and Lewis (Scooter) Libby, Mr. Armitage was known to be unenthusiastic about the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

From those two facts, numerous pundits and talking heads have deduced that Mr. Rove and Mr. Libby were guiltless, that there was no White House effort to expose Ms. Wilson, and that the entire leak investigation was a partisan witch hunt and perhaps an abuse of discretion by the special counsel, Patrick Fitzgerald. The same pundits now proclaim that Mr. Armitage’s minor role somehow proves the White House didn’t seek to punish Valerie Wilson and her husband, former Ambassador Joe Wilson, for his decision to publicly debunk the Presidential misuse of dubious intelligence from Niger concerning Iraq’s alleged attempts to purchase yellowcake uranium.

But whatever Mr. Armitage did, or says he did, in no way alters what Mr. Rove and Mr. Libby did in the days that followed, nor does it change their intentions. It’s a simple concept—two people or more can commit a similar act for entirely different reasons—but evidently it has flummoxed the great minds of contemporary journalism.

In this instance, Mr. Armitage says he was merely “gossiping” with Mr. Novak, who seems to have been primed to question him about the Wilson affair. But both Mr. Rove and Mr. Libby sought to undermine Joe Wilson’s credibility—and perhaps to victimize him and his wife—by planting information about Valerie Wilson with two reporters. Mr. Rove gave that information to Time reporter Matt Cooper, who got confirmation from Mr. Libby. And Mr. Libby provided the same poisonous tip to New York Times reporter Judith Miller.

Almost from the beginning of his investigation in December 2003, Mr. Fitzgerald has known about the blabby Armitage, who at least came clean promptly. But Mr. Fitzgerald, a Bush appointee of impeccable reputation, understood that the Armitage confession was of limited relevance—and it didn’t discourage the special counsel from conducting a thorough probe that uncovered a secretive, high-level effort, emanating from the office of Vice President Dick Cheney, to discredit Joe Wilson and to use his wife’s two decades of undercover work for her country as a weapon against him. Indeed, the only reason Mr. Armitage knew about Valerie Wilson was that he had read a negative dossier on Joe Wilson prepared at the behest of Mr. Libby.

On his blog, Mr. Corn, the Washington editor of The Nation, recently responded to the opinion-makers who were so eager to misuse his reporting to exonerate the White House. “As Hubris will make clear,” he wrote, “Rove’s leak (to Robert Novak and Matt Cooper) and Libby’s leak (to Judith Miller and Cooper) were part of a campaign to discredit former ambassador Joseph Wilson. That’s no conspiracy theory. The available evidence proves this point.”

According to an article published by Mr. Corn in The Nation on Sept. 5, the available evidence also proves that Valerie Wilson was not only a genuine C.I.A. undercover officer, but that she was in charge of agency operations seeking proof of Iraq’s weapons-of-mass-destruction programs. Specifically, she ran the Joint Task Force on Iraq, which was part of the Counterproliferation Division of the C.I.A.’s Directorate of Operations. She worked overseas, including trips to Jordan and other theatres of operations, using a “nonofficial cover.” By disclosing her identity, the Bush officials ruined her career and endangered the sources and methods she had used in the President’s service. Hubris also suggests strongly that her alleged role in dispatching her husband to Niger has been exaggerated.

All this is quite contrary to the dominant right-wing perspective in Washington. So now we will see whether those who were so thrilled by the Armitage scoop are honest enough to confront more significant and embarrassing facts. But the fundamental issues have not changed.

Rather than confront Mr. Wilson’s accusations directly, the White House went after him and his wife—and then lied about the involvement of its senior officials in disclosing her identity. The perpetrators of these unpatriotic partisan acts have yet to be punished, and the President, as usual, has failed to uphold his own professed ethical standards. It is a simple matter, and yet still too challenging for the national press to understand.

The crux of the correction, regarding a piece by Debbie Nathan on Kurt Eichenwald's internet-child-porn reporting, is an amplification of the right of the Times—and of you!—, as per federal law, to inadvertently view kiddie porn. (Here we come a-trolling, XTube.com!)

Even though Salon is The Transom's sworn life-long enemy, we'll admit it's clear they nobly did the right thing. Still, ya just can't help but feel terrible watching such a legal beat-down. Watching the Salon-Times legal department match-up is sort of like watching Condoleeza Rice and Scooter Libby mash a bag full of kittens.

Now, as the pre-trial jousting in Mr. Libby’s case picks up momentum, the onetime loyal West Wing confidant—Dick Cheney’s Dick Cheney—will have to choose between protecting himself and protecting the White House. Specifically, insiders say, he will have to choose between a not-guilty verdict and a Presidential pardon.

“It does put him in this difficult situation of putting the administration on trial,” said a lawyer in the case. “Things are coming out that would never have come out, solely because he’s going to fight the charges.”

As Mr. Libby’s lawyers serve demand after demand for evidence that they hope will exculpate their client, special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald rallies back with briefs seeded with less-than-flattering assertions about Mr. Libby’s bosses.

Responding to Mr. Libby’s lawyers in a May 12 filing, for example, Mr. Fitzgerald included what many considered to be a shocking and revealing document: a copy of The New York Times Op-Ed column “What I Didn’t Find in Africa,” written by former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson and calling into question some of the Bush administration’s claims regarding Iraq’s nuclear-weapons program, annotated in Mr. Cheney’s script with the question: “[D]id his wife send him on a junket?”

On Friday, Mr. Libby’s lawyers filed a response with the court, saying their client hadn’t seen the clipping until the F.B.I. showed him a copy—an argument that served to distance himself from the Vice President, if not exactly contradicting him.

But more importantly, this exhibit painted a picture of a Vice President angered by the column, and with clear knowledge of the relationship between Mr. Wilson, his wife and the circumstances of his trip to Niger.

This is the second time that Mr. Libby’s lawyers have been slapped in the face with information that they themselves requested to aid in his defense.

In a letter in January, and then in a filing with more detail last month, Mr. Fitzgerald reported that the President allowed Mr. Cheney to authorize selective leaking of a classified National Intelligence Estimate report to counter administration critics on Iraq. The leak prompted outrage from Democrats, who saw a contradiction in Mr. Bush’s insistence that leaks were indefensible, and led Representative Jane Harman to crown him the “leaker-in-chief.”

“In defending himself, he’s already had to reveal the degree to which the Vice President, the President and others have approved and/or directed the leaking of what might be classified information,” said a defense lawyer who has handled government clients. It’s “exposed the inner workings of what they may have preferred to keep private. His defense keeps the spotlight on the workings of the White House, which have proved to be sometimes embarrassing.”

As in many discovery processes, the prosecutor wants to minimize the amount of material provided to the defense, and the defense wants to maximize their haul.

“Fitzgerald puts this stuff out to raise the cost to Libby, because he knows Libby doesn’t want this stuff out there,” suggested one lawyer familiar with the investigation. “Every time Libby punishes him on discovery, he’ll punish the guy that Libby lied to protect …. There’s certainly tension, and [Fitzgerald] obviously perceives that pushing on this stuff is going to cause [Libby] a great deal of pain.”

Others rejected that theory. “Fitzgerald is the straightest-shooting prosecutor in the country. He’s not playing any kind of game or retaliating. He’s just showing the court what he needs,” said a lawyer familiar with the case. A spokesman for Mr. Fitzgerald, Randall Samborn, declined to respond.

One former administration official downplayed the significance of Mr. Fitzgerald’s findings.

“Would they rather not have had to deal with it? Sure. Did it flip everybody’s views on Scooter? Probably not.” And, in fact, many of the Republican faithful—including former Cheney advisor Mary Matalin—have joined the advisory committee of the Libby Legal Defense Trust in a show of support. Of course, many others have not.

“From the administration’s view, the not-flattering stuff tends to be the not-flattering debates that already happened,” said the official.

Mr. Libby discussed portions of the National Intelligence Estimate used to make the case for the Iraq war, and whose credibility has since been seriously undermined.

“Why you get defensive on it is that it highlights that subsequent events have proven that to be an inaccurate assessment,” the official added.

In a key document request in March, the defense wrote: “The actions of government officials from the White House, the State Department and the CIA—and the documents they generated—are part and parcel of this story.”

Telling that story is their job. Keeping that story under wraps is the White House’s.

Mr. Libby’s sprawling legal-defense team—which includes lawyers from Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison in New York; Baker Botts in Washington, D.C.; Jones Day in California; and Dechert in Philadelphia—declined to comment on how Mr. Libby’s loyalty to the administration has shaped his defense strategy.

(Last month, D.C. District Court Judge Reggie Walton threatened to issue a gag order to lawyers in the case after reporters were informed of a filing in the case before it was filed with the court.)

Mr. Libby is accused of obstructing justice, making false statements and perjury coming out of his testimony in an investigation into the possibly illegal disclosure of a C.I.A. operative’s identity. The charges are based on alleged contradictions between statements Mr. Libby made to the F.B.I. and a grand jury and his conversations with reporters in the summer of 2003.

Based on the court’s filings and conversations with lawyers familiar with the case, Mr. Libby’s team appears to be conducting a broad and vigorous defense.

Their basic claim is that Mr. Libby was so busy he lost track of whom he talked to, which helps to explain why he didn’t remember where he had learned of Valerie Plame, the C.I.A. operative whose leaked identity is at the center of the present inquiry, nor whom he talked to about her.

So they’ve requested an avalanche of information that would seem to convey exactly what that was like—among them the President’s daily intelligence briefings, as well as notes and drafts of stories from reporters. They’ve argued that Ms. Plame’s C.I.A. affiliation was not a closely held secret, and questioned the authority of Mr. Fitzgerald to bring his charges.

Lawyers said that the goal seemed to be to offer enough diversions from the narrow questions of who originally told Mr. Libby that Ms. Plame was a C.I.A. operative, and what his state of mind was when he talked to F.B.I. agents and the grand jury before his indictment.

They described it as a typical defense strategy of providing a broad and sometimes confusing story in place of the prosecutor’s focused and narrow one.

“I’m not hearing that the basic charges are false with the discussion that’s been going on in the court papers,” said a lawyer familiar with the case.

But if the facts of the case are not in question, Mr. Libby has nevertheless pleaded not guilty. So his defense must rest in the interpretation of those facts, and the environment in which these facts emerged.

The tension between a defendant and his or her employer—whether in the case of a C.E.O. and a company or a Congressional staffer and a Congressional office—always exists, argued Abbe Lowell, a prominent D.C. defense attorney. “What’s uncommon is that it’s one of the highest-ranking government officials’ highest-ranking deputy,” he said.

One obvious tactic for defendants is to argue that they were simply executing orders. Yet Mr. Libby’s team is taking a more nuanced approach, trying to strike a balance between painting a portrait of Mr. Libby as charged with massive responsibilities in his role as Mr. Cheney’s deputy, and not pointing the finger at his boss. In other words, a consistent defense that is still not embarrassing to the White House.

Lawyers said it was impossible to know whether there were lines of inquiry that the defense was not pursuing at the behest of Mr. Libby.

“There are some times people might go down and say, ‘I’m not going to raise this, I’m not going to do this’—friendship, family, employers, it could be a whole host of facts that could enter into a decision,” explained a lawyer with a small involvement in the case.

But some with experience in these types of fraught situations said that while clients will typically comply with their lawyers’ suggestions, sometimes that resolution is hard-won.

“There is a real tension there, because you’re doing your utmost to defend your client, who has extreme loyalty,” said a Washington lawyer familiar with independent-counsel investigations. “It takes a lot of convincing with a client to let you do your job to complete the defense.”

The lawyer added: “It’s going to be very, very difficult to get Libby to point the finger to one or two above him—if that, in fact, occurred.”

But in a move that seemed to favor Mr. Libby’s White House associates, his lawyers seemed quite willing to finger the leaker. In a hearing held to debate subpoenas issued to reporters and media outlets, William Jeffress, one of Mr. Libby’s lead attorneys, strongly hinted that at an alibi source for former New York Times reporter Judy Miller, and possibly for Robert Novak and Bob Woodward (two of the other journalists embroiled in the case) as well: someone “maybe [in the] State Department.”

“Your honor, we respectfully would submit that we think the source for Mr. Novak and Mr. Woodward, who wasn’t even in the White House—we think the fact that what he knew, which is certainly as much or more than Mr. Libby knew about Ms. Wilson, convinced him that there was nothing wrong with disclosing her name to a reporter. That she was not covert. She was not classified.”

For observers, this raises questions about whether the defense strategy is designed to get Mr. Libby off, or to try to get gratitude from the administration.

“I just don’t think that folks in the administration are saying that Libby should fall on his sword so as not to embarrass people,” said a lawyer familiar with the investigation. “He crossed that bridge when he decided to defend the case.”

Now, as the pre-trial jousting in Mr. Libby’s case picks up momentum, the onetime loyal West Wing confidant—Dick Cheney’s Dick Cheney—will have to choose between protecting himself and protecting the White House. Specifically, insiders say, he will have to choose between a not-guilty verdict and a Presidential pardon.

“It does put him in this difficult situation of putting the administration on trial,” said a lawyer in the case. “Things are coming out that would never have come out, solely because he’s going to fight the charges.”

As Mr. Libby’s lawyers serve demand after demand for evidence that they hope will exculpate their client, special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald rallies back with briefs seeded with less-than-flattering assertions about Mr. Libby’s bosses.

Responding to Mr. Libby’s lawyers in a May 12 filing, for example, Mr. Fitzgerald included what many considered to be a shocking and revealing document: a copy of The New York Times Op-Ed column “What I Didn’t Find in Africa,” written by former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson and calling into question some of the Bush administration’s claims regarding Iraq’s nuclear-weapons program, annotated in Mr. Cheney’s script with the question: “[D]id his wife send him on a junket?”

On Friday, Mr. Libby’s lawyers filed a response with the court, saying their client hadn’t seen the clipping until the F.B.I. showed him a copy—an argument that served to distance himself from the Vice President, if not exactly contradicting him.

But more importantly, this exhibit painted a picture of a Vice President angered by the column, and with clear knowledge of the relationship between Mr. Wilson, his wife and the circumstances of his trip to Niger.

This is the second time that Mr. Libby’s lawyers have been slapped in the face with information that they themselves requested to aid in his defense.

In a letter in January, and then in a filing with more detail last month, Mr. Fitzgerald reported that the President allowed Mr. Cheney to authorize selective leaking of a classified National Intelligence Estimate report to counter administration critics on Iraq. The leak prompted outrage from Democrats, who saw a contradiction in Mr. Bush’s insistence that leaks were indefensible, and led Representative Jane Harman to crown him the “leaker-in-chief.”

“In defending himself, he’s already had to reveal the degree to which the Vice President, the President and others have approved and/or directed the leaking of what might be classified information,” said a defense lawyer who has handled government clients. It’s “exposed the inner workings of what they may have preferred to keep private. His defense keeps the spotlight on the workings of the White House, which have proved to be sometimes embarrassing.”

As in many discovery processes, the prosecutor wants to minimize the amount of material provided to the defense, and the defense wants to maximize their haul.

“Fitzgerald puts this stuff out to raise the cost to Libby, because he knows Libby doesn’t want this stuff out there,” suggested one lawyer familiar with the investigation. “Every time Libby punishes him on discovery, he’ll punish the guy that Libby lied to protect …. There’s certainly tension, and [Fitzgerald] obviously perceives that pushing on this stuff is going to cause [Libby] a great deal of pain.”

Others rejected that theory. “Fitzgerald is the straightest-shooting prosecutor in the country. He’s not playing any kind of game or retaliating. He’s just showing the court what he needs,” said a lawyer familiar with the case. A spokesman for Mr. Fitzgerald, Randall Samborn, declined to respond.

One former administration official downplayed the significance of Mr. Fitzgerald’s findings.

“Would they rather not have had to deal with it? Sure. Did it flip everybody’s views on Scooter? Probably not.” And, in fact, many of the Republican faithful—including former Cheney advisor Mary Matalin—have joined the advisory committee of the Libby Legal Defense Trust in a show of support. Of course, many others have not.

“From the administration’s view, the not-flattering stuff tends to be the not-flattering debates that already happened,” said the official.

Mr. Libby discussed portions of the National Intelligence Estimate used to make the case for the Iraq war, and whose credibility has since been seriously undermined.

“Why you get defensive on it is that it highlights that subsequent events have proven that to be an inaccurate assessment,” the official added.

In a key document request in March, the defense wrote: “The actions of government officials from the White House, the State Department and the CIA—and the documents they generated—are part and parcel of this story.”

Telling that story is their job. Keeping that story under wraps is the White House’s.

Mr. Libby’s sprawling legal-defense team—which includes lawyers from Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison in New York; Baker Botts in Washington, D.C.; Jones Day in California; and Dechert in Philadelphia—declined to comment on how Mr. Libby’s loyalty to the administration has shaped his defense strategy.

(Last month, D.C. District Court Judge Reggie Walton threatened to issue a gag order to lawyers in the case after reporters were informed of a filing in the case before it was filed with the court.)

Mr. Libby is accused of obstructing justice, making false statements and perjury coming out of his testimony in an investigation into the possibly illegal disclosure of a C.I.A. operative’s identity. The charges are based on alleged contradictions between statements Mr. Libby made to the F.B.I. and a grand jury and his conversations with reporters in the summer of 2003.

Based on the court’s filings and conversations with lawyers familiar with the case, Mr. Libby’s team appears to be conducting a broad and vigorous defense.

Their basic claim is that Mr. Libby was so busy he lost track of whom he talked to, which helps to explain why he didn’t remember where he had learned of Valerie Plame, the C.I.A. operative whose leaked identity is at the center of the present inquiry, nor whom he talked to about her.

So they’ve requested an avalanche of information that would seem to convey exactly what that was like—among them the President’s daily intelligence briefings, as well as notes and drafts of stories from reporters. They’ve argued that Ms. Plame’s C.I.A. affiliation was not a closely held secret, and questioned the authority of Mr. Fitzgerald to bring his charges.

Lawyers said that the goal seemed to be to offer enough diversions from the narrow questions of who originally told Mr. Libby that Ms. Plame was a C.I.A. operative, and what his state of mind was when he talked to F.B.I. agents and the grand jury before his indictment.

They described it as a typical defense strategy of providing a broad and sometimes confusing story in place of the prosecutor’s focused and narrow one.

“I’m not hearing that the basic charges are false with the discussion that’s been going on in the court papers,” said a lawyer familiar with the case.

But if the facts of the case are not in question, Mr. Libby has nevertheless pleaded not guilty. So his defense must rest in the interpretation of those facts, and the environment in which these facts emerged.

The tension between a defendant and his or her employer—whether in the case of a C.E.O. and a company or a Congressional staffer and a Congressional office—always exists, argued Abbe Lowell, a prominent D.C. defense attorney. “What’s uncommon is that it’s one of the highest-ranking government officials’ highest-ranking deputy,” he said.

One obvious tactic for defendants is to argue that they were simply executing orders. Yet Mr. Libby’s team is taking a more nuanced approach, trying to strike a balance between painting a portrait of Mr. Libby as charged with massive responsibilities in his role as Mr. Cheney’s deputy, and not pointing the finger at his boss. In other words, a consistent defense that is still not embarrassing to the White House.

Lawyers said it was impossible to know whether there were lines of inquiry that the defense was not pursuing at the behest of Mr. Libby.

“There are some times people might go down and say, ‘I’m not going to raise this, I’m not going to do this’—friendship, family, employers, it could be a whole host of facts that could enter into a decision,” explained a lawyer with a small involvement in the case.

But some with experience in these types of fraught situations said that while clients will typically comply with their lawyers’ suggestions, sometimes that resolution is hard-won.

“There is a real tension there, because you’re doing your utmost to defend your client, who has extreme loyalty,” said a Washington lawyer familiar with independent-counsel investigations. “It takes a lot of convincing with a client to let you do your job to complete the defense.”

The lawyer added: “It’s going to be very, very difficult to get Libby to point the finger to one or two above him—if that, in fact, occurred.”

But in a move that seemed to favor Mr. Libby’s White House associates, his lawyers seemed quite willing to finger the leaker. In a hearing held to debate subpoenas issued to reporters and media outlets, William Jeffress, one of Mr. Libby’s lead attorneys, strongly hinted that at an alibi source for former New York Times reporter Judy Miller, and possibly for Robert Novak and Bob Woodward (two of the other journalists embroiled in the case) as well: someone “maybe [in the] State Department.”

“Your honor, we respectfully would submit that we think the source for Mr. Novak and Mr. Woodward, who wasn’t even in the White House—we think the fact that what he knew, which is certainly as much or more than Mr. Libby knew about Ms. Wilson, convinced him that there was nothing wrong with disclosing her name to a reporter. That she was not covert. She was not classified.”

For observers, this raises questions about whether the defense strategy is designed to get Mr. Libby off, or to try to get gratitude from the administration.

“I just don’t think that folks in the administration are saying that Libby should fall on his sword so as not to embarrass people,” said a lawyer familiar with the investigation. “He crossed that bridge when he decided to defend the case.”