Scooter sees his shadow; trial to last at least 6 more weeks

AP photo: Scooter pokes his head out of Range Rover; Sees his shadow (Atty. Wells, below), indicating at least 6 more weeks of perjury trial.

Tuesday marked the first full day of the Libby trial-proper. I am surprised that Team Libby is running with "The White House set him up to cover for Karl Rove" defense. I guess they really are going there.

Fitz is taking no crap from nobody, nohow. He expressed his displeasure to the "if we only told you half the scary-classified-shit Libby had on his plate, you'd wonder how he managed to remember his own name" defense. Atty. Wells played dumb about that and was given a warning.

Fitz's opening remarks were incredibly detailed--reporter/Libby interactions were put into the context of the "oop, who told you there were WMD?" timeline of spring 2003. This is about the war, there's no two ways about it. Indicted on perjury/obstruction; convicted in the court of global opinion.

Only one witness examined/Xexamined on Tuesday: Fmr. Undersec. State Marc Grossman (UnderSecretary of State for Political Affairs). He was one of the guys at State tasked by VP Cheney's office to investigate Wilson's trip to Niger. Grossman was visited by Richard Armitage the night before his testimony (to the FBI? Grand Jury?). Grossman was visited by two other apparitions: the ghost of State Dept. past (Albright) and the ghost of State Dept. Future (Rice).

Ok, ok, I have a bad sense of humour. The reason Grossman's important is that Libby wants to push the idea that State told him Wilson's wife was responsible for "boondoggle" trip to Niger (i.e. nepotism). Fitz cast suspicion on Grossman, after it was revealed that Grossman & Armitage couldn't stop debriefing each other, after one or the other testified. Blabbermouths. That's quite a tight ship they run over there, eh?

Thanks so much to everyone at Firedoglake.com for providing the liveblogging. And David Corn, too! I don't know how I'd sustain myself, otherwise!

N.B. special thanks to Christy at FDL for providing the following essential information:

Because I've gotten lots of questions on this, I'm going to do the Fitz versus Wells ensemble eval.: Fitz was in a charcoal gray suit with a cerulean blue tie with a darker blue pattern woven into it.

*flutter* Oh, I do declare!