WASHINGTON – Once the closest adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby was convicted Tuesday of lying and obstructing a leak investigation that shook the top levels of the Bush administration.

Four guilty verdicts ended a seven-week CIA leak trial that focused new attention on the Bush administration’s much-criticized handling of intelligence reports about weapons of mass destruction in the run-up to the Iraq war.

In the end, jurors said they did not believe Libby’s main defense: that he hadn’t lied but merely had a bad memory.

Their decisions made Libby the highest-ranking White House official convicted in a government scandal since National Security Adviser John Poindexter in the Iran-Contra affair two decades ago.

The case cost Cheney his most trusted adviser, and the trial revealed Cheney’s personal obsession with criticism of the war’s justification.

Trial testimony made clear that President Bush secretly declassified a portion of the prewar intelligence estimate that Cheney quietly sent Libby to leak to Judith Miller of The New York Times in 2003 to rebut criticism by ex-ambassador Joseph Wilson. Bush, Cheney and Libby were the only three people in the government aware of the effort.

More top reporters were ordered into court to testify about their confidential sources.

Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald said the verdict closed the nearly four-year investigation into how the name of Wilson’s wife, Valerie Plame, and her classified job at the CIA were leaked to reporters in 2003 – just days after Wilson publicly accused the administration of doctoring prewar intelligence. “The results are actually sad,” Fitzgerald told reporters after the verdict. “It’s sad that we had a situation where a high-level official person who worked in the office of the vice president obstructed justice and lied under oath. We wish that it had not happened, but it did.”