It's a terrible thing when you're French president: You're never kept in the loop. It started earlier, when Nicolas Sarkozy was interior minister: His chief of staff and one of his advisers, his best friend Brice Hortefeux, didn't see fit to tell him that they had both discreetly met, in 2005, with Abdullah Senoussi, the mastermind of the Libyan attacks in Europe. Because, they told the court, he hadn't said anything important.

And when French intelligence services exfiltrated Muammar Gaddafi's big-money man from France in 2012, neither Sarkozy's friend, the businessman Alexandre Djouhri, nor Bernard Squarcini, the central director of domestic intelligence (DCRI), whom he had appointed, had the presence of mind to warn the president. But at the trial on suspicions of Libyan financing of his 2007 presidential campaign, Sarkozy held firm on Wednesday, February 5, to the line he has set himself: He knew nothing and there is no evidence to the contrary.

On September 3, 2011, Bashir Saleh requested that his family be allowed to take refuge in France. Gaddafi's former chief of staff and head of Libya's colossal sovereign wealth fund was no stranger to the former French president. "I had three meetings with him, but only one, on June 2, 2011, at La Lanterne,' the president's residence in Versailles, Sarkozy explained. "With Foreign Minister Alain Juppé, we tried to find a peaceful way out of the war: For Gaddafi to leave power and withdraw with his family to Libya, but he refused."

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