Judge Reggie Walton has just issued a new order in the Lewis Libby case. In it, Walton refused nearly all of Libby’s requests for documents concerning Joseph Wilson’s trip to Africa, Valerie Plame Wilson’s role in arranging that trip, the identities of people in the government outside the CIA who knew Valerie Plame Wilson worked for the CIA, and several other items. Libby’s request, Walton wrote, was “largely without merit.”

It is clear from the order that, despite prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald’s allegations that the leak of Valerie Plame Wilson’s identity “damage[d]…all of us,” Walton is trying to keep the case away from the CIA leak itself and closely limited to the issue of whether Libby lied to the grand jury:

Although the Special Counsel’s criminal investigation initially focused on whether government officials illegally disclosed Ms. Wilson’s employment with the CIA, the defendant has not been charged with any such violation. Rather, the only question the jury will be asked to resolve in this matter will be whether the defendant intentionally lied when he testified before the grand jury and spoke with FBI agents about statements he purportedly made to the three news reporters concerning Ms. Wilson’s employment. The prosecution of this action, therefore, involves a discrete cast of characters and events, and this Court will not permit it to become a forum for debating the accuracy of Ambassador Wilson’s statements, the propriety of the Iraq war or related matters leading up to the war, as those events are not the basis for the charged offenses. At best, these events have merely an abstract relationship to the charged offenses.

But Walton, in the next breath, conceded that keeping the case so narrowly limited will likely not be possible:

Nonetheless, this Court recognizes that the charged offenses occurred against this backdrop and appreciates that some reference to Ambassador Wilson, his trip to Niger, and his wife during the trial is probably inevitable. Any testimony or other evidence relating to these subjects, however, will be admitted for limited purposes — to establish what the principal players (the defendant, the three news reporters, and any other key witnesses) knew about Ambassador Wilson’s wife’s affiliation with the CIA and when they knew it, and as evidence of the defendant’s purported motive to reveal Ms. Wilson’s affiliation with the CIA to reporters. In fact, as to this first basis of admissibility, as the indictment makes clear, one aspect of the government’s case will be an attempt to establish the defendant’s knowledge of Ms. Wilson’s affiliation with the CIA before his conversations with Miller, Russert, and Cooper. However, whether the information possessed by any of the principal players was true or not is immaterial to this case; rather, what will be relevant in regards to either the prosecution or defense is what, if anything, they knew about the subject and when they acquired that information. And documents reflecting what these principal players may have known (or did not know) could be used to attack the credibility and recollection of these potential witnesses.
In response to the charges filed against him, the defendant relates that one aspect of his defense will be that he was not engaged in a sinister effort to punish Ambassador Wilson or Valerie Plame Wilson; rather, any discussions he had with the reporters concerning Ambassador Wilson, his trip to Niger, or Valerie Plame Wilson were conducted solely for the purpose of refuting the accuracy of Ambassador Wilson’s pronouncements. According to the defendant, his requests for documents relating to discussions he had with other government officials or news reporters that show that he was simply engaged in legitimate efforts to rebut the merits of Ambassador Wilson’s findings are material to the preparation of his defense, as their content would arguably support his claim that the government’s position that he intended to make false statements, commit perjury, and obstruct justice is incorrect. In limited respect, the Court agrees. Therefore, if the government is in possession of documents that show the defendant’s intent to participate or his actual participation in such legitimate efforts, those documents must be produced pursuant to Rule 16.

Finally, in a separate order, Judge Walton came up with a compromise ruling for Libby’s request for documents showing that Valerie Plame Wilson was indeed an undercover CIA employee and that the disclosure of her identity damaged national security — the two key assertions underlying the entire Fitzgerald investigation. Fitzgerald apparently provided Walton with the material, which Walton examined away from the presence of Libby’s lawyers:

Upon careful review of the government’s requests, its supporting declarations from the intelligence community filed ex parte, in camera, and the original documents from which the summaries were created, the Court finds that the documents and information identified in the government’s Section 4 CIPA filing are extremely sensitive and their disclosure could cause serious if not grave damage to the national security of the United States.

Fitzgerald proposed to give the Libby defense what the judge described as “summaries setting forth the relevant information contained in the classified documents,” and the judge agreed, ordering Fitzgerald to give Libby the summaries, not the classified material:

(1) The government shall provide to the defense by June 9, 2006, the proposed substitution recounting Valerie Plame Wilson’s employment history with the Central Intelligence Agency from January 1, 2002, and thereafter.
(2) The government shall provide to the defense by June 9, 2006, the proposed substitution discussing potential damage (if any) caused by the alleged disclosure of Valerie Plame Wilson’s affiliation with the Central Intelligence Agency.
(3) The government shall, as requested, provide to the defense by June 9, 2006, the true names of three individuals whose identities were redacted from classified documents previously made available to the defense, and shall identify for the defense the specific documents and locations within those documents where those names should be inserted.

More on what all this means later.