Remember Ollie North, the arms broker in the Reagan White House basement?

Well, Scooter's defense team has quietly retained John D. Cline who was North's lead defense attorney during the Iran-Contra fallout.

Cline, who specializes in the use of classified information in defending clients charged with wrongdoing in national security cases, appears to have inspired Libby's legal team to employ the same approach that succeeded in keeping North out of jail. libbybluefingerprint

In the North case, the Iran-Contra independent counsel, Lawrence Walsh, was forced to dismiss many of the central charges against North, including the most serious ones - that that North defrauded taxpayers by diverting proceeds from arms sales to Iran to finance the Nicaraguan Contras - because intelligence agencies and the Reagan Administration refused to declassify the documents necessary for a trial on those charges.

Cline's detractors say he is what is known as a "graymail" specialist - an attorney who purposely makes onerous demands on the federal government to disclose classified information in the course of defending his clients, in an effort to force the government to dismiss the charges.

Cline defends his actions on the grounds that the use of classified information is necessary in assuring that defendants are accorded due process and receive fair trials.

Thus far, Libby's legal team has already demanded that federal investigators produce more than 10 months of the President's Daily Brief, or PDBs, the president's morning intelligence briefing.

Libby's team, led by Cline, insisted that it was imperative for Scooter's defense to be able to review the PDBs because part of the defense is that Scooter may have had a faulty memory regarding conversations he had with government officials and reporters regarding Valerie Plame.

PDBs are among the most highly classified documents in government and, in the past, the Bush Administration has defied bipartisan requests from the Congressional Intelligence Committees to turn them over for review.

Patrick Fitzgerald responded that the prosecutor's office had only "received a very discrete amount of material relating to PDBs" based on his generic request for any documents related to Joe Wilson, Valerie Plame, and Wilson's trip to Niger and "had never requested copies of PDBs" themselves, in part because "they are extraordinarily sensitive documents which are usually highly classified."

However, the request from the Libby defense team is a strong indication that the "North Legal Strategy" has been executed.

Will it work in Scooter's case?

Well, Special Counsel Walsh and many of his deputies are on record as speculating that the Reagan Justice Department refused to declassify documents necessary to try North because officials were personally sympathetic to him. A North trial would have politically embarrassed the Reagan Administration and a North conviction might have led to charges against higher officials in the Administration.

Sound familiar?