The trial may still be a year away, but there are already exciting legal developments in the I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby case.

Or as the case probably soon will be called, CSI: Cheney.

Just over the past few weeks, lawyers for the vice president’s former chief of staff – indicted in a case about leaking classified material to tarnish critic Joe Wilson and his CIA agent wife – have revealed several defense approaches bold and creative enough to set off judicial activism. By the time of the actual trial next January, Libby’s attorneys may be declaring that if the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance court doesn’t sit, you must acquit.

In mid-February, special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald informed Judge Reggie Walton that a problem had come up with about 100 pages of Libby’s handwritten notes that Fitzgerald had subpoenaed: “We can’t read a substantial part of them.”

Libby’s handwriting, said Fitzgerald, “has a little bit of hieroglyphics in there, and so what we have to do is translate them so we can tell the intelligence agencies what their content is so we can figure out how sensitive it is.”

And it’s not as if Libby can make out his own writing, either. When last seen, Fitzgerald and Libby’s lawyers were discussing some kind of immunity in case he misreads some of his notes. This would presumably protect Libby from having to read his own handwriting under oath.

But if, during the key moments of devising policy on Iraq, the key aide to the Bush administration’s key figure couldn’t make sense of his own notes, that could explain a lot.

Not that Libby isn’t trying other defenses.

His attorneys have asked that the government produce 277 President’s Daily Briefings – described by the vice president as the “family jewels” of national security – so that the PDBs can show how much Libby had on his mind all the time, making it hard to remember what he did or didn’t tell reporters.

Fitzgerald calls the request “nothing short of breathtaking,” adding “The defendant’s effort to make history in this case by seeking 277 PDBs in discovery – for the sole purpose of showing that he was ‘preoccupied’ with other matters when he gave testimony to the grand jury – is a transparent attempt at ‘greymail.’ “

Meaning a hope that the government, faced with the risk of 277 PDBs leaking out, might just decide to drop the charges.

If that doesn’t work, Libby’s lawyers might try to subpoena the nuclear launch codes.

But last Monday, Walton ruled that Libby didn’t need the full President’s Daily Briefings, just accounts of the kinds of material that was in them. And the defense didn’t need material from 277 of them, just from the few weeks in 2003 when the news on Wilson’s wife was allegedly leaked.

Fortunately, there’s still another defense left.

At the end of February, Harvard professor Daniel L. Schachter, an expert on the “vulnerability of memory,” told NBC News that he’d been hired by the Libby defense team to explain how hard it was sometimes to remember things.

Such as what the vice president said about attacking a critic’s wife.

This approach may or may not end up working. Walton has already warned the Libby defense team, “We are not going to have a trial that boils down to who has the better memory expert, the defense or the government.”

Or at least that’s what reporters think they remember the judge saying.

Libby’s attorneys are likely to have many more opportunities for additional creativity. Last week, the White House turned over to the court a large batch of e-mails related to the case, which had somehow failed to turn up under the original court order of several years ago.

But so far, Libby’s defense seems to reflect the Iraq policy that he helped so much to shape: He says he couldn’t make sense of the information in front of him, he couldn’t remember what he’d said in the past – and most important, that all the really vital evidence is secret.

As a defense policy, it would make Donald Rumsfeld proud.