Denis Collins: One of Libby's Peers?

There's a lot that's disturbing about Scooter Libby's trial and the verdict.

One buffoon that stands out among the buffoons is juror Denis Collins.

I get the feeling that he's a Joe Wilson wannabe. Collins exhibits that same slime factor.

Special Prosectuor and egomaniac Patrick Fitzgerald was handed a gift when political hack Collins landed in the jury pool.

Collins wasn't satisfied with convicting Scooter Libby. Sure, he was pleased that he had the opportunity to ruin his life; but he wanted more.

Just like Joe Wilson and his extrovert spy wife Valerie Plame, and just like out of control Patrick Fitzgerald, and like the others with a political axe to grind such as Tim Russert, Collins wanted a bigger fish than Libby. He wanted to bring down the Bush administration.

You could see how Collins relished his moment in the spotlight, his magical fifteen minutes of fame that he probably had been fantasizing about when he should have been listening to testimony and considering the facts of the case.

From The Washington Post:

The jurors who huddled around two pushed-together conference tables for 10 days, meticulously filling 34 pages of facts from the trial on a large flip chart, believed that Vice President Cheney's former chief of staff had been "pilloried" for a CIA leak that other top White House aides had committed along with him, according to one member of the panel.

Still, the juror said yesterday, the jury concluded that I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby had lied to FBI agents and a federal grand jury that investigated the leak. Sifting through mounds of evidence convinced the panel that Libby's memory of conversations with colleagues and journalists was not as faulty as the defense contended.

"We're not saying that we didn't think Mr. Libby was guilty of the things we found him guilty of," said the juror, Denis Collins. "But it seemed like he was . . . the fall guy."

Collins, an author and ex-Washington Post reporter, was the only one of the seven women and four men on the jury to provide an inside glimpse into the method and thought process that the panel used to find Cheney's former top aide guilty of four felony counts.

Collins is an ex-Washington Post reporter!

That's as bad as Rosie O'Donnell sitting on a jury for a case against Donald Trump.

Collins actually worked and socialized with witnesses in the trial.

During his decade at The Post, he worked with witness Bob Woodward for three or four years. He also worked with The Post's Walter Pincus, another witness.

Until recently, Collins was witness Tim Russert's neighbor. He would attend Russert's backyard barbeques.
There's no question that Collins is a card-carrying member of the lib elite. He went to grade school with Maureen Dowd, attended New York Times columnist John Tierney's wedding, and is a pal of Michael Isikoff.

It gets worse. Collins wrote a book about the CIA, SPYING: The Secret History of History.

How did Fitzgerald get so lucky?

Landing on that jury had to be a dream come true for Collins, too.

There's no way that justice could be done with someone like him on the jury.

Impossible.

Collins's detailed description of the jury's deliberations, in public comments and interviews yesterday, suggests that Libby's attorneys made headway with one of the themes they emphasized throughout the case: that the defendant, as lead defense attorney Theodore V. Wells Jr. described it, was made a scapegoat by the White House to protect other presidential aides who were complicit in disclosing Plame's identity to reporters.

During the jury's days of methodical deliberations, "it was said a number of times, 'What are we doing with this guy here?' " Collins told reporters on the steps outside the federal courthouse. "Where's Rove, where's -- you know, where are these other guys?" Collins said, referring to Karl Rove, Bush's top political adviser, and Richard L. Armitage, a former deputy chief of staff who testimony showed had been the first person to leak Plame's name.

Moreover, Collins said, jurors believed that Libby had been carrying out a directive by his immediate boss, Cheney, to "go out and talk to reporters" to tarnish Wilson's reputation. But Collins said jurors stopped short of discussing whether the vice president specifically urged Libby to tell journalists about Plame's CIA job.

Nevertheless, the jury, by Collins's telling, was more strongly persuaded by the prosecution's central contention: It was implausible that Libby could have forgotten his role in finding out and telling reporters about Plame when he met with federal investigators. In particular, Collins said, jurors were struck by the juxtaposition of testimony from former White House press secretary Ari Fleischer and eight hours of audiotapes they heard of Libby's grand jury testimony.

This Collins guy doesn't sound like an unbiased juror. He sounds like a Democrat operative.

Collins told reporters on the steps outside the federal courthouse. "Where's Rove, where's -- you know, where are these other guys?" Collins said, referring to Karl Rove, Bush's top political adviser, and Richard L. Armitage, a former deputy chief of staff who testimony showed had been the first person to leak Plame's name.

Where's Rove?

Obviously, Collins was disappointed that he had but one Bush administration official to condemn for his lib cohorts.

This was a political witch hunt, pure and simple.

A prosecution witness, Fleischer testified that Libby had told him "hush hush" about Plame over lunch on July 8, 2003 -- a Tuesday. In his grand jury testimony from March 2004, Libby said that Tim Russert, Washington bureau chief of NBC News, told him about Plame during a conversation two or three days later, and that Libby had the impression he was learning about her for the first time. "It was just very hard not to believe how he could remember it on a Tuesday and then forget it on a Thursday," Collins said.

He said jurors thought it was especially implausible that Libby forgot when and how he learned about Plame, given that he repeated that information to other people. "If I tell it to someone else, it's even more unlikely that I would forget it," Collins said.

I'd like Collins to put his memory to the test.

Does he have perfect recollection?

I guess he doesn't.

Collins felt the need to take plenty of notes during the trial, some currently on The Huffington Post. Since he plans to write a book about the trial, I suppose he didn't want to take any chances. He wouldn't want to forget the details of his experience.

I wonder if Collins was willing to cut Bill Clinton any slack when it came to remembering?

FROM THE WASHINGTON TIMES: In the portions of President Clinton's Jan. 17 deposition that have been made public in the Paula Jones case, his memory failed him 267 times. This is a list of his answers and how many times he gave each one.

I don't remember - 71
I don't know - 62
I'm not sure - 17
I have no idea - 10
I don't believe so - 9
I don't recall - 8
I don't think so - 8
I don't have any specific recollection - 6
I have no recollection - 4
Not to my knowledge - 4
I just don't remember - 4
I don't believe - 4
I have no specific recollection - 3
I might have - 3
I don't have any recollection of that - 2 I don't have a specific memory - 2
I don't have any memory of that - 2
I just can't say - 2
I have no direct knowledge of that - 2
I don't have any idea - 2
Not that I recall - 2
I don't believe I did - 2
I can't remember - 2
I can't say - 2
I do not remember doing so - 2
Not that I remember - 2
I'm not aware - 1
I honestly don't know - 1
I don't believe that I did - 1
I'm fairly sure - 1
I have no other recollection - 1
I'm not positive - 1
I certainly don't think so - 1
I don't really remember - 1
I would have no way of remembering that - 1
That's what I believe happened - 1
To my knowledge, no - 1
To the best of my knowledge - 1
To the best of my memory - 1
I honestly don't recall - 1
I honestly don't remember - 1
That's all I know - 1
I don't have an independent recollection of that - 1
I don't actually have an independent memory of that - 1
As far as I know - 1
I don't believe I ever did that - 1
That's all I know about that - 1
I'm just not sure - 1
Nothing that I remember - 1
I simply don't know - 1
I would have no idea - 1
I don't know anything about that - 1
I don't have any direct knowledge of that - 1
I just don't know - 1
I really don't know - 1
I can't deny that, I just -- I have no memory of that at all - 1

Sometimes it's hard to remember. If a lib can't recall, it's no big deal. A conservative isn't granted the same leeway.

The 11 jurors who convicted Libby on all but one count were, in several respects, atypical of the District's population. In a city that is heavily Democratic and where attention to politics runs high, the jurors were a largely apolitical group. Under careful questioning during jury selection, Libby's attorneys weeded out members of the large initial jury panel who said they held strong negative views of the Bush administration -- and even ones who said they followed news and politics closely.

In a city that is majority African American, all but two members of the jury -- both women -- were white. In addition, the jury was highly educated, including three members with PhDs.

Yeah, right.

BS.

I'm sure Libby's attorneys did their best to weed out the Bush-haters, but that's virtually impossible in overwhelmingly lib D.C.

Moreover, one could conclude that being "highly educated" really means that the jurors were indoctrinated in lib think, and brainwashed by lib professors at lib universities.

According to Collins, the tenor of deliberations was cool. Sitting in armchairs around the conference tables, with an adjacent office for phone calls to home and work, he said: "We were in a cocoon." To begin, the jury members used the large Post-it pages they had procured from the court to detail each witness's testimony, motivation to tell the truth, believability and state of mind.

"We took about a week just to get all these little building blocks there . . . We reached no decision quickly."

"In the end," Collins said, "what we came up with was that Mr. Libby either was told by or told to people about Mrs. Wilson at least nine times."

After reaching the verdict on the last charge at 11:15 yesterday morning, Collins said the jurors displayed little emotion. But after they filed out of the courtroom slightly more than an hour later, their verdict rendered, several wept as they walked through a corridor toward Walton's chambers for a final meeting with the judge.

Collins said he interpreted the tears as the release of pent-up tension from the long, celebrated trial. "It was not," he said, because jurors were thinking, " 'Oh, we're sorry to see Libby convicted.' "

Good grief.

Oh, the drama!

What strain these courageous jurors had been under as they served their country!

What sacrifice!

Maybe some jurors shed tears because they weren't comfortable with the verdict. Perhaps some had been strong-armed by hacks like Collins.

Clearly, the members of the jury with an anti-war, anti-Bush political agenda won.

The problem is the trial wasn't about Bush. It wasn't about the war. It was about Scooter Libby's memory.

Collins and Fitzgerald, Joe Wilson, and libs from sea to shining sea are celebrating their victory.

They shouldn't. They shouldn't be proud of torturing Libby and his family because they wanted to do at least some damage to the administration or speak out against the war.

The fact that Collins made such politically charged statements reveals that justice wasn't blind in this case. It was political.