Breaking: Girlfriday Must Testify at Lobbyists' Espionage Trial

BLT:

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice must testify in the trial of two lobbyists accused of espionage, a federal judge ruled today, according to the Associated Press.

The lobbyists, Steven Rosen and Keith Weissman, former employees of The American Israel Public Affairs Committee or AIPAC, have denied wrongdoing. The AP reports that U.S. District Judge T.S. Ellis III ruled the defendants may call Rice, national security adviser Stephen Hadley, deputy national security adviser Elliott Abrams and others to testify about what role, if any, the men played in crafting U.S. foreign policy.

Update: Prosecutors had challenged the subpoenas in federal court.

From FDL, Christy smells the greymail strategy. Here is Christy's take:

“Greymail” is a term that refers to substantial classified document requests on behalf of a defendant. It’s a tactic that is in bad standing with most prosecutors who deal with national security matters, because it puts you in a difficult place at times: defend your case or defend your government’s secrets.

Graymail is particularly invidious because it is likely to be most successfully employed by former officials from the heart of the government machine who subsequently face trial.

With regard to the “greymail” issue here, this is a complex subject that boils down to this for Team Libby: Scooter had a job that dealt with a lot of high level national security matters. He’d now like to use his complex job as an excuse for committing perjury, but to do that, he has to get access to a lot of the documents that crossed his desk in the service of the Veep. (Shorter Scooter: My job was hard, so you can’t hold me responsible for lying.)

The most famous case for the greymail strategy was Oliver North. John D. Cline was a defense attorney for Oliver North (and was the attorney for Scooter Libby) and successfully used graymail to dismiss the most serious charges against North (see Iran-Contra Affair)