So Who's She Protecting?
Powerline
New York Times reporter Judith Miller has finally been released from jail, after agreeing to testify to what everyone already knew, i.e., that she discussed Valerie Plame with Scooter Libby, Dick Cheney's chief of staff. I wrote about this last night; like many others, I expressed puzzlement over why Miller has finally agreed to name Libby, when he gave her and other journalists permission to do so a year ago.
Several readers have written to point out that I had missed a key fact that was not disclosed in the article I linked to last night, but was in today's article in the Washington Post:
After she received this "personal, voluntary waiver," Miller said, her lawyer approached the special prosecutor in the leak investigation and received an assurance that her testimony would be narrowly limited to her communications with the source. She did not mention the source's name in her brief appearance on the courthouse steps, but he has been identified previously as I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby...
Bingo. No one is crazy enough to sit in jail over a silly misunderstanding--she wanted a "personal" waiver, and Libby was happy to give it to her, in fact thought he had given it to her last year, but somehow they failed to communicate. No, Judith Miller sat in jail until the prosecutor agreed that she would not have to testify about any source of the information about Valerie Plame other than Libby. Miller had multiple sources, and everyone already knew that she talked to Libby. The real question is, who was her other source? Some have speculated that it may have been Plame's husband, Joe Wilson, or maybe another journalist. Now, we may never know.
It's hard not to find the prosecutor's action here disturbing. Who is the second source that Miller went to jail to protect? Why is the prosecutor willing to forgo information about the second source? If Plame's own husband was telling journalists that his wife was a CIA employee, isn't that highly relevant to whether someone in the administration should be criminally prosecuted for saying the same thing? Or, if Plame's employment was so widely known that journalists were telling one another that she worked for the Agency, isn't that likewise relevant to any prospective criminal prosecution?
Is Scooter Libby being set up? Let's hope not.
UPDATE: One thing seems clear in all of this -- Miller's lawyer Bob Bennett is way out of line as he makes the rounds of the talk shows suggesting that Scooter Libby should have called Judith Miller earlier to personally assure her that she had his permission to testify. For example, he told Wolf Blitzer:
Mr. Libby knew where Judy was. He had her phone number. They knew each other. There was no secret where she was. So I find it amazing that somebody would suggest that Judy would unnecessarily spend 85 days in jail.
I find amazing that Bennett would say something this ridiculous. As CNN has reported, Libby's lawyer (Joseph Tate) told Miller's original lawyer (Floyd Abrams) a year ago that she could testify as to Libby's conversation with Miller. And Libby himself testified twice before the grand jury about his conversation with Miller. The notion put forth by Bennett that Miller thought Libby's waiver of confidentiality might have been coerced is nonsense. As experienced lawyers like Abrams and Bennett know, these waivers indicate on their face that they are freely and voluntarily executed. In the real world, a lawyer-to-lawyer statement from Tate to Abrams would have left no doubt that the waiver was not coerced. But if was any doubt (and if Libby was the source being protected), Miller and her attorneys had a year to clear it up before she went to jail.
In any case, Libby would have had no reason to contact Miller's attorney again. As Tate told CNN, Libby assumed that Miller was protecting another source, as she very likely was. (Another, more speculative, possibility is that Miller was trying to play the martyr, perhaps to restore her "street credibility" after coming under attack from liberals for her reporting on WMD in Iraq). Libby simply had no reason to think that Miller was in jail because she was protecting him, nor is there any reason to think that now. But as soon as Libby learned that Miller was claiming that she needed more from him, he immediately provided it. Thus, it's unconscionable for Bennett to blame Libby for Miller's incarceration. If all Miller wanted was another, more personalized assurance from Libby, she would have had her lawyer obtain it sooner.
In this regard, it's also odd that Miller remained in jail for more than ten days after Libby provided his most recent assurances. This is further evidence that the real problem for Miller was not the absence of Libby's voice repeating what his lawyer had long ago said. As John suggests, it's most likely that the real event that had to occur in order to spring Miller was the prosecutor's decision not to target the source Miller really was protecting. |
