Mr. Libby discussed some of the conclusions of the intelligence report with Judith Miller, then a reporter for The New York Times, in a meeting on July 8, 2003, the court documents say. The previous day, the White House, for the first time, had publicly admitted that Mr. Bush's statement in the State of the Union address earlier that year, alleging that Mr. Hussein had sought uranium in Africa, should not have been in the speech.

A little more than a week later, under continuing pressure, the White House published a declassified version of the executive summary of the estimate, in an effort to make the case that Mr. Bush's statement had been justified by the intelligence community's best judgment.

The disclosure on Wednesday night was part of the legal maneuvering over documents Mr. Libby has sought from the government to make his defense. But the political impact of the disclosure could be more significant than the legal impact.

The court filing said Mr. Libby testified that the "vice president advised defendant that the president had authorized defendant to disclose certain information in the N.I.E." The prosecutors said Mr. Libby testified that he recalled "getting approval from the president through the vice president to discuss material that would be classified but for that approval" and that those events "were unique in his recollection."

The leak was intended, the court papers suggested, as a rebuttal to an Op-Ed article in The New York Times on July 6, 2003, by Joseph C. Wilson IV, a former United States ambassador and the husband of Ms. Wilson. Mr. Wilson wrote that he traveled to Africa in 2002 after Mr. Cheney raised questions about possible nuclear purchases by Iraq. Mr. Wilson wrote that he concluded it was "highly doubtful" Iraq had sought nuclear fuel from Niger.

At Mr. Cheney's office, the Op-Ed article was viewed "as a direct attack on the credibility of the vice president (and the president) on a matter of signal importance: the rationale for the war in Iraq," according to the court papers filed by the prosecutor, Patrick J. Fitzgerald.

The filing was intended to limit the number of documents that the government has to turn over to Mr. Libby and his defense team.