The Dick's Scholia

I had blogged here about the significance of The Dick's personal scholia on Wilson's NYT op-ed piece of July 6, 2003, arguing from this that:

In the end it is quite clear that The Dick was not even interested in combating the substance of Wilson’s claims, so he just went into bunker mode and sent his minions to make a ridiculous ad hominem attack on Wilson; Valerie Plame was just collateral damage.

What I didn't realize at the time was just what an integral role this annotated article actually played in the outing, but today at closing arguments, Fitzgerald made it clearer. If you look at FDL's transcription of the closing arguments here (start at 4:12) you'll see that Fitzgerald tries to demonstrate that these handwritten notes of the VP became the basis of the talking points for damage control sessions at the WH on July 7 and July 8. What it looks like then, is that The Dick literally gave his annotated NYT copy to Cathie Martin (secretary) and/or Scooter and directed them to work on discrediting Wilson off of those points in the article that he had underlined or from his comments scribbled at the top. Based on the VP's annotated article, then, Martin changed her first set of talking points for a presentation on how to discredit Wilson into a second version of talking points. O yes, some of Bush's hacks were also at these meetings, meaning that the office of the president was also intimately involved in the outing, not just the VP's. As Fitz brilliantly argues, bullet one of the second version of this presentation relates to Wilson's wife ("It is not clear who authorized Joe Wilson's trip to Niger") and, like the other bulleted points, undoubtedly came directly from the VP's scholia on this article ("Or did his wife send him on a junket?"). At any rate, what Libby claims is that in the next few days after these talking points were being discussed he forgot about the significance of talking point numero uno. Yeah, right.

It would be interesting to know exactly how Fitz got this copy of The Dick's newspaper. I would guess that when he interviewed Cathie Martin about the matter, she still had it in her files and her testimony got Fitz onto this. That's why Fitz keeps alluding the VP's role in all this (this newspaper combined with Martin's testimony are his hard evidence for that assertion). If Libby is convicted, one wonders whether this may pave the way finally to probe The Dick. Wouldn't it be rich if an actual hard copy of Judy Miller's former newspaper came back to bite The Dick's ass?