Libby Faces Three Years in Prison

One of the most senior aides in the Bush administration, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, is due to be sentenced in Washington tomorrow after being found guilty earlier this year of perjury.

Libby, 56, who was chief of staff to the vice-president, Dick Cheney, was found guilty in relation to the administration's outing of the CIA agent, Valerie Plame, in a row over the Iraq war.

The prosecutor, Patrick J Fitzgerald, asked for Libby to be sentenced to three years. The defence asked for clemency.

The US district court judge, Reggie Walton, could send him to serve an immediate jail sentence or allow him to remain at home pending an appeal. President George Bush could pardon him either straight away or wait until he is leaving office in January 2009.

He was found guilty in March of four charges of lying to the FBI and obstruction of justice. The FBI had been investigating the outing of Ms Plame, who subsequently lost her job.

The leaking of her name to the press appeared to be an act of revenge by the White House against her husband, Joe Wilson, a former ambassador who challenged Mr Bush's case for invading Iraq. Mr Wilson had dismissed as untrue claims that Iraq was seeking uranium from Niger to build a nuclear bomb.

Libby was one of the administration ideologues, one of the original neoconservative group known as the Vulcans, who advocated an aggressive foreign policy, including invasion of Iraq.

He had been taught at Yale by another of the Vulcans, Paul Wolfowitz, who was recently forced out of the World Bank.

Mr Wolfowitz invited Libby to join him at the state department in the 1980s. In 1997, Libby became a founding member of the Project for the New American Century, the neoconservative team seeking to reshape US policy in the Middle East. He joined Mr Cheney as chief of staff and national security adviser in 2001.

Under oath, Libby told the investigators looking into the leak of Ms Plame's identity that he learned her identity from a reporter, Tim Russert. The television presenter denied this.

During the trial, prosecutors said Libby had lied. The defence claimed he had suffered a memory lapse.