Wall Street Journal again:

Mr. Wilson’s 2003 op-ed claiming that “the intelligence related to Iraq’s nuclear weapons program was twisted to exaggerate the Iraqi threat” was the supposed animus for the Administration’s leak of the identity of Mr. Wilson’s wife, Valerie Plame. As the leaking whodunit became a media frenzy and others ducked for cover, Mr. Libby was nearly alone in defending the Administration for being honest (if wrong) about prewar intelligence, an act that landed him in the net of special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald.

Mr. Libby didn’t leak Ms. Plame’s name to journalist Robert Novak; Mr. Armitage did that deed, though neither he nor his close friend, Mr. Powell, bothered to tell Mr. Bush or the world. Based on the trial record and our own long experience with Mr. Libby, we also don’t think Mr. Libby lied. As Mr. Fitzgerald’s prosecution circled back again and again, Mr. Libby’s defense that his memory faltered in recalling the details of long ago conversations is entirely plausible for a busy White House aide.

The case against him was based on conflicting accounts of a single conversation Mr. Libby had in July 2003 with each of three journalists. The judge threw out the count concerning his talk with Judith Miller, and the jury found him not guilty on the count involving Matthew Cooper. His conviction on four other counts comes down essentially to a dispute over Mr. Libby’s claim that Tim Russert had told him about Ms. Plame. Russert, the NBC journalist who has since died, initially told the FBI it was possible he told Mr. Libby, but by the time of the trial Russert said he was sure he had not done so. Neither man had notes from their call, and it is possible that Russert’s memory was as faulty as Mr. Libby’s.

Prosecutors claimed Mr. Libby was motivated to lie about what he’d heard from Russert on July 11 to protect himself against what he told Ms. Miller and Mr. Cooper a day later. But if Mr. Libby didn’t lie about those conversations, as the case proved, his motive to lie about Russert vanishes. The trial also showed that Mr. Libby had spoken that same week with journalists Robert Novak and Bob Woodward, both of whom were asking questions about Ms. Plame and could have also become confused with Russert in Mr. Libby’s recollections.

Mr. Libby’s lawyers attempted to call an expert on memory as a witness at the trial, but the judge refused on the remarkable grounds that everyone knows about memory. The trial itself took place in early 2007 amid the passions of Mr. Bush’s decision to “surge” troops in Iraq, and there were protests on the Washington Mall. The judgment by a Washington, D.C. jury was more a verdict on the Bush Administration than it was about the confusing facts of Mr. Libby’s alleged deceit. The Plame affair was a proxy for the larger political dispute over Iraq, and Mr. Libby became the Beltway sacrifice. By trumpeting his guilt, critics were able to impugn Mr. Bush’s policies by insisting the President had “lied us into war.”