"Your Honor, now that we have sort of burned what was sealed, my understanding of that conversation, there are people talking over each other, my understanding is that was a reference that everyone knows it, that Mr. Wilson is the unnamed ambassador," Fitzgerald said. "Mr. Wilson didn't reveal himself as the unnamed ambassador until July 6. This was prior to that time. We turned it over in an abundance of caution but I don't believe that says it, and frankly there is a very limited number of reporters that we found out who had known it. I can't represent we know every reporter because we took seriously the attorney general guidelines."
"Official one" faces no criminal charges in the ongoing investigation into the leak of covert CIA officer Valerie Plame Wilson and is said to be cooperating with the special counsel's two year-old probe.
But Libby's defense attorneys suggested during the February 24 court hearing that "official one" is responsible for the leak.
Jeffress and Theodore Wells, another attorney on Libby's defense team, have argued that Fitzgerald should provide the defense with all of the evidence his investigation has obtained regarding "official one" because it's crucial in proving that Libby wasn't lying when he testified that he heard about Plame Wilson's CIA work from reporters.
"Your Honor, simply it is a fact that is key to this case to know what reporters out there knew or had heard about Wilson's wife, what they were saying to each other, what they were saying to government officials," Jeffress said. "And here is a key person, the first person that we know of, according to the evidence, actually discussed Mr. Wilson's wife's employment with a reporter and not only did it then but did it again with a separate reporter later. This is some person not in the White House."
At the February 24 court hearing, Jeffress, Libby's attorney, in arguing that the defense should be provided with additional evidence such as handwritten notes, transcripts, letters, emails and phone logs Fitzgerald collected during the investigation, said "official one" discussed Plame Wilson's CIA status with at least two reporters, one of whom told Libby that "official one" told him that Plame Wilson was a CIA officer.
Sources close to the case have identified Woodward and Novak as the reporters "official one" spoke to about Plame Wilson.
Fitzgerald argued that Libby's attorneys are routinely circumventing the facts surrounding the case against Libby, which is about perjury not who first unmasked Plame Wilson's identity.
"Your Honor, the one thing that is clear is we should focus on what the allegations are," Fitzgerald said. "The indictment alleges that on Monday Mr. Libby told [former White House press secretary Ari] Fleischer this information about Mr. Wilson's wife and indicated that it wasn't widely known, on a Monday."
"On Wednesday he claims to have learned it as if it were new for the first time from ["Meet the Press's" Tim] Russert in his conversation even though we've alleged six different conversations, more than six conversations in the month before he discussed it with everyone from the vice president to people at the CIA, to ranking officials at the State Department," Fitzgerald added.
Jason Leopold is editor of the online investigative news magazine The Public Record, http://www.pubrecord.org, and the author of the National Bestseller, "News Junkie," a memoir. Visit www.newsjunkiebook.com for a preview. He is also a two-time winner of the Project Censored award, most recently, in 2007, for an investigative story related to Halliburton's work in Iran. He was recently named the recipient of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation's Thomas Jefferson Award for a series of stories he wrote that exposed how soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan have been pressured to accept fundamentalist Christianity.
