WASHINGTON, Feb 25: Indicted ex-White House aide I. Lewis ‘Scooter’ Libby needs access to the ‘crown jewels’ of secret US intelligence to defend himself against perjury charges, his lawyers said on Friday.

But special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald, prosecuting the CIA-leak scandal, warned any decision by a judge to order the handover of such material would trigger a standoff with the White House and derail the case.

Mr Libby’s lawyers told Judge Reggie Walton that data including the President’s Daily Brief (PDB), a highly classified intelligence document detailing threats against the United States, was vital to preparing his case. They argued that Mr Libby was so busy with the most deadly threats facing the United States, that any misstatements to Fitzgerald’s probe into the outing of CIA spy Valerie Plame were simply mistakes or the result of confusion.

“We are talking about the family jewels,” Libby’s lead lawyer Theodore Wells told Walton, relating how his client would huddle every morning at 7:00 am with his boss Vice President Dick Cheney with the most sensitive US secrets.

“I am not saying Lewis Libby was just busy ... he was busy with the family jewels,” Wells said in the latest pre-trial hearing on Friday.

Wells handed Walton a blue, locked briefcase, in which he said was an already released but still classified sample of the kind of data he wanted to read.

The theatrical move prompted the judge to summon lawyers from both sides to approach his bench, and to switch on a ‘white noise’ machine, which shrouded their deliberations from the public galleries.

Mr Libby denies charges of obstruction of justice, perjury and making false statements in an intrigue bound up in the US drive to invade Iraq in 2003.

His trial has been set for January next year.—AFP