In recent months, opponents of the Bush administration have hoped the perjury and obstruction trial of Lewis Libby would reveal a tightly organized White House conspiracy to smear former ambassador Joseph Wilson for daring to speak out against the war in Iraq. Instead, what Day One of the trial revealed was a White House deeply divided unto itself, with top officials scrambling to avoid blame for the famous “16 words” affair, as well as the Plame leak — and willing to point fingers and take down fellow White House staffers to do it.

The disarray inside the administration was exposed by Ted Wells, Libby’s defense lawyer. In his opening statement to the jury, Wells discussed the questions about Plame that dogged the White House in mid-2003. Joseph Wilson had famously pointed to top Bush aide Karl Rove as the culprit for the Plame leak, and reporters were demanding answers. In response, then-White House spokesman Scott McClellan flatly denied that Rove was involved. But McClellan made no such definitive statement for Libby, leading Libby to suspect that he was being set up to take the blame. Yesterday, Wells told the jury of the anger Libby felt as war broke out inside the White House staff.

“He was concerned about being the scapegoat,” Wells said of Libby. “Mr. Libby said to the vice president, ‘People in the White House are trying to set me up, people in the White House are trying to make me a scapegoat.’“ Wells went on to explain: “People in the White House [were] trying to protect a man named Karl Rove, the president’s right-hand man…His fate was important to the Republican party if they were going to stay in office. [Rove] had to be protected…the person to be sacrificed was Scooter Libby.”

Wells went on to quote a vow from Libby: “I will not be sacrificed so Karl Rove can be protected.”

The revelation stunned some in the White House, who had expected Libby’s defense to focus on his argument that, amid the crush of work in the vice president’s office as the war got underway in the first half of 2003, he simply didn’t remember a number of events concerning Valerie Plame Wilson. As it turned out, Libby did raise the memory defense, but his “I will not be sacrificed” revelation was what got everyone’s attention.

Libby’s suspicions about his former colleagues surfaced time after time in Wells’ opening statement. Wells stressed that Libby had not been a source for Robert Novak, whose July 2003 column mentioning Mrs. Wilson set off the controversy. And he pointed to others in the administration — none of them indicted by prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald — who, Wells said, tried to plant the Plame story with reporters. “There will be some people at the White House — at the White House, not the office of the vice president — who you will learn may have pushed reporters to write stories about Mrs. Wilson,” Wells told the jury. “There may be people at the State Department who pushed reporters to write stories about Mrs. Wilson. But Scooter Libby did not push any reporter to write a story about Mrs. Wilson. Yet the man who pushed no one is sitting here in this courtroom.”

The main leaker, Wells said repeatedly, was former State Department official Richard Armitage. “Mr. Libby did not leak to Robert Novak,” Wells argued. “Richard Armitage did….As the prosecutor said on his opening, there is no dispute that Mr. Libby was not — not — the source for Robert Novak. The source for Robert Novak was Richard Armitage.” Libby became angry, Wells said, when “people were implying that he was involved in something that he was not.” (Wells appeared to stress Armitage’s name in part because Fitzgerald never mentioned it in his own opening statement.)

In a move that surely compounded the anxieties of those in the White House who are dismayed to see open war break out with a former top official, Wells promised that there would be more revelations, and more emphasis on the White House rift, as the trial progresses. Among other things, he told jurors Libby will offer as evidence a note written by Vice President Cheney during a conversation with Libby. Apparently Libby told the vice president that he, Libby, was being set up by the White House, and Cheney jotted the following: “Not going to protect one staffer and sacrifice the guy that was asked to stick his neck in the meat grinder because of the incompetence of others.”

“The person to be protected,” Wells told the jury, “was Karl Rove.”

– Byron York, NR’s White House correspondent, is the author of the book The Vast Left Wing Conspiracy: The Untold Story of How Democratic Operatives, Eccentric Billionaires, Liberal Activists, and Assorted Celebrities Tried to Bring Down a President — and Why They’ll Try Even Harder Next Time.