Do you remember what you were doing on June 23, 2003?

Neither do I.

What about more generally? Do you remember what you were doing during all of June and July of that year?

Okay, maybe not.

If you’re having problems recalling those times, you can join a parade of big cheeses from the government and the press who are displaying a veritable epidemic of memory loss at the trial of Lewis Libby, the former chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney.

The case is all about remembering. Libby argues that he forgot the details of how he learned that Valerie Plame Wilson had played a role in sending her husband, the anti-Bush former ambassador Joseph Wilson, to Niger to investigate claims that Iraq had tried to purchase uranium there.

Libby says the vice president told him about Mrs. Wilson’s role in early June of 2003, but then, in the course of the month that followed — a month consumed with battles over intelligence leading to the war in Iraq —  Libby says he simply forgot, and later told investigators that he had first learned it from journalists.

He’s on trial for perjury and obstruction of justice, all stemming from that claim.

His argument — and his defense team hasn’t yet made its case — is that in the crush of events in the early months of the war, he was just so busy that he forgot about not-terribly-important issues like Mrs. Wilson.

Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald didn’t believe Libby. But the government’s case relies on recollections, too — of witnesses who say they told Libby about Mrs. Wilson, or that Libby told them about her. 

So it’s not surprising that Libby’s lawyers are challenging those memories.

What is surprising is that they have had so much success.

Take the case of Judith Miller, the once-celebrated reporter for the New York Times.

She first talked to Libby about the Wilson matter on June 23, 2003.  During that conversation, she testified, Libby told her that Mrs. Wilson worked for the CIA — something that Miller didn’t think was a big deal at the time.

But it became a big deal as Miller fought off grand jury subpoenas and went to jail before finally being forced to testify.

And when she did testify, did she tell the grand jury about that June 23 meeting?

No — she forgot. About the whole thing.

“When you first appeared before the grand jury, you didn’t remember that at all?” defense attorney William Jeffress asked Miller.

“Nothing about it,” Miller answered.

In court this week, however, Miller seemed to have a sharp picture of Libby at the once-forgotten meeting. “Mr. Libby appeared to me to be agitated and frustrated and angry,” she testified.  “He is a very low-key and controlled guy, but he seemed annoyed.”

How could she remember that? Jeffress asked.

Miller explained that, after her first appearance before the grand jury, she found her notes from that June 23 interview — they were in a shopping bag full of notebooks under her desk in New York — and it all came back.

Miller also had trouble remembering other aspects of the case. For example, after Joseph Wilson published his now-famous op-ed in the Times on July 6, 2003, she remembers deciding to look into his story.

She resolved to talk to everyone she could about it. But, other than Libby, she couldn’t remember anyone she talked to. Not a single person.

But Miller wasn’t the only one with a bad memory at the trial. 

There was also Robert Grenier, a former top official at the CIA. He got a call from Libby on June 11, 2003 asking who Joseph Wilson was and who sent him to Africa.

Grenier looked into it and gave Libby the answers that very same day.

In retrospect, that was important: It was one of the earliest times that Libby talked to someone about Mrs. Wilson and her job at the CIA.

But at the trial we learned that when Grenier was asked about it during the Fitzgerald investigation, he couldn’t remember whether he had told Libby or not.

When he was first interviewed by the FBI, he didn’t recall. “My response at the time was that I didn’t clearly remember,” Grenier testified.

Later, before the grand jury, Grenier recounted, “I told them that I may have, but I didn’t recall.”

It wasn’t until a year later, when the Libby case was again in the news, that Grenier remembered that he remembered.

“I was going over it and over and over in my mind,” he told the jury. Finally, the memory came.

Given all of this, Libby’s defenders often ask the question: Out of all these bad memories — lapses involving significant things — how come Lewis Libby is the only guy to be indicted?

Perhaps there’s a good reason — we haven’t heard all the evidence yet.

But it’s a good question.

York is a White House correspondent for
National Review. His column appears in The Hill each week.
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