Libby Suffered Memory Failure, Lawyers Say
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Lawyers for a former White House official facing obstruction of justice and perjury charges, I. Lewis Libby, told a federal court yesterday that they plan to call a psychology professor to testify that Mr. Libby’s alleged misstatements were the result of memory failure and not deliberate lies.
Mr. Libby, who served as chief of staff to Vice President Cheney, is accused of interfering with an investigation into the leak of the identity of a CIA officer, Valerie Plame. The leak took place after Ms. Plame’s husband, Joseph Wilson, published an article challenging some of President Bush’s statements about Iraq’s weapons programs. Mr. Libby has contended that he learned of Ms. Plame’s role from journalists, but the reporters have denied that.
“Mr. Libby will show that the snippets of conversation at issue in this case took place amid a rush of pressing national security matters that commanded his attention throughout his long and stressful work day,” the attorneys wrote. They plan to buttress their claims of inadvertent error by turning to a memory expert from the University of California at Los Angeles, Robert Bjork.
A summary of Mr. Bjork’s proposed testimony said his conclusions are based on a range of memory research, including two papers with political overtones. One is a study of testimony from a Nixon White House aide, John Dean, about his conversations with President Nixon.
Another is a review of Mr. Bush’s claims to have learned of the first plane to hit the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001 from video he saw before the second plane struck.
Both claimed memories were inaccurate. Numerous details of Mr. Dean’s recollections were at odds with tapes that Nixon secretly made of the conversations. Video of the first plane to strike the twin towers did not emerge until some time after the attacks.
The author of the Dean paper, Ulric Neisser of Cornell University, said Mr. Libby’s arguments about the fallibility of memory were correct. “This may turn out to be an effective defense,” Mr. Neisser said in an interview. “If everything hinges on who he learned it from first, people do forget that stuff all the time.”
The judge, Reggie Walton, will have to decide whether to admit the expert testimony. The trial is scheduled for early 2007.
