Who is Victoria Toensing, and why does anyone care what she has to say? I just read that she will be testifying before Rep. Waxman's Committee, presumably as some sort of "rebuttal" witness to Valerie Plame. Presumably, she is going to "testify" that revealing the identities of CIA operatives is just peachy-keen as far as she is concerned. I don't know why anybody calls this kind of bullshit "testimony." "Testimony" is supposed to be a statement made under oath or otherwise under penalty of perjury that the speaker is "swearing" to be true. In the olden days, an "oath" was supposed to be a compact between the speaker and Almighty God committing the speaker to tell the truth, on pain of eternal damnation. Does anyone have any illusions that this remotely describes what Ms. Toensing will be doing?
In any event, I'd like to see somebody pose the question as to why Ms. Toensing is so fired up to defend the right of people like Libby to, for all intents and purposes, commit treason by endangering the lives of courageous people like Ms. Plame who try to serve their country by gaining valuable and reliable intelligence while acting in a covert capacity. Obviously, the simple answer is that Ms. Toensing, as well as her husband/law partner, Joseph DiGenova, are nothing more than corrupt Republican hacks posing as lawyers who will do or say anything that the Republican Party asks of them.
However, there is another interesting angle to the connection between Toensing/DiGenova and Libby that bears scrutiny. Back in early 2001, quite a few eyebrows were raised when Toensing and DiGenova were rallying to the defense of what appeared to be a Democratic cause. Toensing and DiGenova appeared before Congress as lawyers defending a Washington lawyer named Jack Quinn. Quinn had been responsible for lobbying President Clinton on behalf of Marc Rich, successfully convincing Clinton to give Rich a pardon as one of his last acts as President. The Rich pardon was truly an extraordinary thing - Rich had been a fugitive for over 20 years, he was under indictment for illegal oil trading with Iran and for having perpetrated one of the largest tax fraud schemes in U.S. history.
It is interesting that the dynamic duo of Toensing and DiGenova took such an interest in defending Clinton's pardon of Rich. In fact, Quinn had not been Rich's lawyer for very long, and he was brought into the Rich defense camp rather late in the day solely because he had connections to Clinton. Rich's real long-standing lawyer was none other than one Irving Lewis "Scooter" Libby. One of Libby's last acts as a private attorney, before moving on as Darth Cheney's Chief of Staff, was to give Quinn a full briefing on the Rich case and set in motion the process that would ultimately bring about the Rich pardon. When the firestorm about the pardon did strike, all of the attention was on Clinton and Democrats like Quinn and DOJ figures like Eric Holder, with a scarcely a mention of Libby's role in the affair. Nevertheless, Toensing and DiGenova came on board, just to make sure that things didn't get out of control and to make sure that Republican Representatives who expressed "outrage" at the pardon kept their ire focused on the Democrats, and didn't reach the real architect of the pardon - Libby.
Marc Rich is a figure who lives in a very important netherworld - the world of oil, money laundering, tax evasion, commodities trading, arms dealing, and the connections between these activities and hard-line factions in Washington and Israel (among other places). These are the folks who brought you the Iraq War. If there's a war in Iran, they're the folks who will bring you that too.
The great importance of the Libby trial was that it opened the window just a crack and gave the public a quick glance at the way the game of power politics is played in the small, and disgusting, underworld of Washington, D.C. It is oh-so-appropriate that denizens of that world such as Toensing and DiGenova are the ones manning the barricades, making sure that that window now gets slammed shut.