Fitzgerald Investigation of Leak of Identity of CIA Agent

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White House fears indictment
White House fears indictment

WASHINGTON, July 14 (UPI) -- White House officials told The Washington Post they fear someone in the Bush administration may be indicted regarding the leak of a covert CIA operative's name.

Memo discussed Wilson-Plame in June 2003 (July 31, 2005) -- White House staffers may have known Joseph Wilson was married to a CIA operative weeks before Wilson publicly criticized Iraq war policy. Time ...

Reporter describes grand jury testimony (July 17, 2005) -- Time magazine reporter Matt Cooper says Vice President Dick Cheney's top White House aide was a source for his 2003 story identifying a CIA ... > full story

Report: Rove was Cooper's 'secret source' (July 10, 2005) -- Deputy White House Chief of Staff Karl Rove was Time magazine correspondent Matt Cooper's secret source, Newsweek reported. Rove's lawyer ... > full story

Schumer demands Rove speak up about leak (July 3, 2005) -- Sen. Charles Schumer, D-NY, called Sunday for Deputy White House Chief of Staff Karl Rove to personally deny leaking the name of a CIA ... > full story

Lawyer denies Rove leaked Plame's name (July 2, 2005) -- A lawyer for Deputy White House Chief of Staff Karl Rove denied Saturday that Rove leaked the name of former CIA agent Valerie Plame to the ... > full story

The Post report Thursday did not name its sources, saying "officials acknowledged privately" that an indictment naming a member of the administration could come this year.

Special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald has been investigating the release of the name of CIA operative Valerie Plame, which is a crime for a government official. But the Post said legal experts said there are other possible problems related to the case, including perjury and obstruction of justice.

Time magazine reporter Matthew Cooper appeared Wednesday before a federal grand jury convened to look into the case. Another reporter, Judith Miller of The New York Times, remains jailed in Virginia because she refuses to appear before the grand jury.

White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove has been linked to Cooper but Rove's attorney Robert Luskin said, "Cooper's truthful testimony will not call into question the accuracy or completeness of anything Rove has previously said to the prosecutor or grand jury," the Post reported.

Rove & Ashcroft face new allegations re leak
What Now, Karl?
Rove and Ashcroft face new allegations in the Valerie Plame affair
by Murray Waas
Village Voice
August 13th, 2005 2:39 PM

Justice Department officials made the crucial decision in late 2003 to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate the leak of the identity of undercover CIA officer Valerie Plame in large part because investigators had begun to specifically question the veracity of accounts provided to them by White House deputy chief of staff Karl Rove, according to senior law enforcement officials.

Several of the federal investigators were also deeply concerned that then attorney general John Ashcroft was personally briefed regarding the details of at least one FBI interview with Rove, despite Ashcroft's own longstanding personal and political ties to Rove, the Voice has also learned. The same sources said Ashcroft was also told that investigators firmly believed that Rove had withheld important information from them during that FBI interview.

Those concerns by senior career law enforcement officials regarding the propriety of such briefings continuing, as Rove became more central to the investigation, also was instrumental in the naming of special prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald.

Up until that point, the investigation had been conducted by a team of career prosecutors and FBI agents, some of whom believed Ashcroft should recuse himself. Democrats on Capitol Hill were calling for him to step down, but he did not. Then on December 30, 2003, Ashcroft unexpectedly recused himself from further overseeing the matter, and James B. Comey, then deputy attorney general, named Patrick J. Fitzgerald as the special prosecutor who would take over the case.

The Justice Department declined to publicly offer any explanation at the time for either the recusal or the naming of a special prosecutor?-an appointment that would ultimately place in potential legal jeopardy senior advisers to the president of the United States, and lead to the jailing of a New York Times reporter.

During his initial interview with the FBI, in the fall of 2003, Rove did not disclose that he had ever discussed Plame with Time magazine correspondent Matthew Cooper, according to two legal sources with firsthand knowledge of the matter. Federal investigators were also skeptical of claims by Rove that he had only first learned of Plame's employment with the CIA from a journalist, even though he also claimed he could not specifically recall the name of the journalist.

As the truthfulness of Rove's accounts became more of a focus of investigators, career Justice Department employees and senior FBI officials became even more concerned about the continuing role in the investigation of Ashcroft, because of his close relationship with Rove. Rove had earlier served as an adviser to Ashcroft during the course of three political campaigns. And Rove's onetime political consulting firm had been paid more than $746,000 for those services.

In response to these new allegations, Representative John Conyers of Michigan, the current ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, and former chairman of the committee as well, said in a statement: "There has long been the appearance of impropriety in Ashcroft's handling of this investigation. The former attorney general had well documented conflicts of interest in this matter, particularly with regard to his personal relationship with Karl Rove. Among other things, Rove was employed by Ashcroft throughout his political career, and Rove reportedly had fiercely advocated for Ashcroft's appointment as attorney general. Pursuant to standard rules of legal ethics, and explicit rules on conflict of interest, those facts alone should have dictated his immediate recusal.

"The new information, that Ashcroft had not only refused to recuse himself over a period of months, but also was insisting on being personally briefed about a matter implicating his friend, Karl Rove, represents a stunning ethical breach that cries out for an immediate investigation by the Department's Office of Professional Responsibility and Inspector General."

A Justice Department spokesman declined on Friday to say what action, if any, might be taken in response to Conyers' request.

Also of concern to investigators when they sought Ashcroft's recusal, according to law enforcement sources, was that a number among Ashcroft's inner circle had partisan backgrounds that included working closely with Rove. Foremost among them was David Isrealite, who served as Ashcroft's deputy chief of staff. Another, Barbara Comstock, who was the Justice Department's director of public affairs during much of Ashcroft's tenure, had previously worked for the Republican National Committee, where she was in charge of the party's "opposition research" operations.

"It would have been a nightmare scenario if Ashcroft let something slip to an aide or someone else they had in common with Rove . . . and then word got back to Rove or the White House what investigators were saying about him," says a former senior Justice Department official, familiar with the matter.

Although not reported at the time, when Ashcroft recused himself from the Plame investigation, Deputy Attorney General Comey said in a statement that the A.G.'s personal staff was also being fully recused in the matter.

Indeed, the appointment of Fitzgerald as special prosecutor and the recusal of Ashcroft came just three weeks after Comey, then the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, was named to be deputy attorney general. Comey himself was no stranger to the issue?-even before he took office.

During his Senate confirmation hearings, Comey had pledged that he would personally see to it that the independence and integrity of the investigation would not be compromised in any way.

At one point during those hearings, Senator Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) cited the close relationships between Ashcroft and Rove, and also between Ashcroft and others also likely to be questioned during the leak probe. Schumer asked Comey:

"How could there not be an appearance of a conflict given the close nexus of relationships?"

"I agree with you that it's an extremely important matter," Comey replied.

Within days of his taking office, several career Justice Department prosecutors took their own longstanding concerns to Comey, telling him that perhaps it would be best for Ashcroft to recuse himself, the same legal sources said. A smaller number also advocated the appointment of an outside prosecutor to take over the matter completely.

The combination of Ashcroft's close relationship with Rove, the omission of critical information from the FBI by Rove during his initial interview with agents, that Ashcroft had been briefed about that interview in particular, and the-then recent appointment of Comey, all allowed for a forceful case being made by career Justice Department employees be made that the attorney general should step aside and a special prosecutor be named.

But says one government official familiar with the process: "When Ashcroft was briefed on Rove, that ended the argument. He was going to be removed. And there was going to be a special prosecutor named."

The new disclosures as to why Ashcroft recused himself from the Plame case and why a special prosecutor was named are important for a number of reasons:

First, they show that from the very earliest days of the criminal probe, federal investigators had a strong belief and body of evidence that Rove and perhaps other officials might be misleading them.

Second, the new information underscores that career Justice Department staffers had concerns that the continued role of Ashcroft and other political aides might tarnish the investigation.

Finally, the new information once again highlights the importance of the testimony of journalists in uncovering whether anyone might have broken the law by disclosing classified information regarding Plame. That is because both Rove and I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby, the chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney?-who are at the center of the Plame investigation?-have said that they did not learn of Plame's employment with the CIA from classified government information, but rather journalists; without the testimony of journalists, prosecutors have been unable to get to the bottom of the matter.

Several journalists have testified to Fitzgerald's grand jury, but New York Times correspondent Judith Miller, who has refused to identify her confidential sources, was ordered to jail by Federal District Court Judge Thomas F. Hogan on July 6, where she remains.

The initial criminal investigation began well before the case was turned over to Fitzgerald in December 2003. It started shortly after conservative columnist Robert Novak first identified Plame as an undercover CIA officer, in a July 14, 2003, column.

The column was written during a time when senior White House officials were attempting to discredit Plame's husband, former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, who was then asserting that the Bush administration had relied on faulty intelligence to bolster its case to go to war with Iraq. Wilson had only recently led a CIA-sponsored mission to the African nation of Niger to investigate claims that Saddam Hussein was covertly attempting to buy enriched uranium from the African nation to build a nuclear weapon.

Wilson reported back to the CIA that the allegations were most likely the result of a hoax.

When Wilson sought out White House officials, believing they did not know all the facts, he was rebuffed. He then went public with his criticism of the Bush administration. It was then that senior administration officials began their campaign to discredit Wilson as a means of countering his criticisms of them.

Rove and Libby, and to a lesser extent then deputy National Security Council (NSC) adviser Stephen J. Hadley (who is currently Bush's NSC adviser), directed these efforts. Both Rove and Libby discussed with Novak, Cooper, and other journalists the fact that Wilson's wife worked for the CIA, and that she was responsible for sending him to Niger, in an effort to discredit him.

The manner by which Rove and Libby learned of Plame's employment at the CIA before they shared that information with journalists is central to whether any federal criminal laws regarding classified information were violated. Rove and Libby have reportedly claimed they learned of the information from journalists. Rove in particular told FBI officials that he first learned of Plame's employment with the CIA from a journalist, but drew their suspicions when he claimed that he could not recall the journalist's name.

Plame's employment with the CIA had been detailed in a highly classified State Department memorandum?-circulated to senior Bush administration officials?-in the days jut prior to conversations between Rove and Libby and journalists regarding Plame.

Dated June 10, 2003, the memo was written for Marc Grossman, then the undersecretary of state for political affairs. It mentioned Plame, her employment with the CIA, and her possible role in recommending her husband for the Niger mission because he had previously served in the region. The mention of Plame's CIA employment was classified "Secret" and was contained in the second paragraph of the three-page classified paper.

On July 6, 2003, Wilson published his now famous New York Times op-ed and appeared on "Meet the Press." The following day, on July 7, the memo was sent to then secretary of state Colin L. Powell and other senior Bush administration officials, who were scrambling to respond to the public criticism. At the time, Powell and other senior administration officials were on their way to Africa aboard Air Force One as members of the presidential entourage for a state visit to Africa.

Rove and Libby apparently were not on that trip, according to press accounts. But a subpoena during the earliest days of the Plame investigation demanded records related to any telephone phone calls to and from Air Force One from July 7 to July 12, during Bush's African visit.

On July 8, Novak and Rove first spoke about Plame, according to numerous press accounts. That very same day, as the American Prospect recently disclosed, Libby and New York Times reporter Judith Miller also discussed Plame.

On July 9, then CIA director George Tenet ordered aides to draft a statement that the Niger information the president relied on "did not rise to the level of certainty which should be required for the presidential speeches, and the CIA should have ensured that it was removed." Rove and Libby were reportedly involved in the drafting of that statement's language.

Two days later, on July 11, Rove spoke about Plame to Time magazine's Matthew Cooper.

On the following day, July 12, an administration official?- apparently not Rove or Libby?-told Washington Post reporter Walter Pincus that Wilson was sent to Niger on the recommendation of his wife, who worked at the CIA.

Two days after that, on July 14, Novak published his column disclosing Plame's employment with the CIA, describing her as an "agency operative" and alleging that she suggested her husband for the Niger mission.

And on July 17, Time magazine posted its own story online, which said: "[S]ome government officials have noted to Time in interviews . . . that Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, is a CIA official who monitors the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. These officials have suggested that she was involved in her husband's being dispatched to Niger." Facing jail time for not disclosing his source, Cooper recently relented, and disclosed that Rove was one of his sources for that information.

But it was Rove's omission during an initial interview, back in October 2003, with the FBI?-that he had ever spoken with Cooper at all?-coupled with the fact that Ashcroft was briefed about the interview, that largely precipitated the appointment of Fitzgerald as special prosecutor, according to senior law enforcement officials familiar with the matter.

Comey, then only recently named deputy attorney general, called a press conference and dramatically announced: "Effective today, the attorney general has recused himself . . . from further involvement in these matters."

He also said he was naming Patrick J. Fitzgerald, who also serves as U.S. attorney in Chicago, as special prosecutor to take over the case. To further assure his independence, Comey also announced that he personally would serve as "acting Attorney General for purposes of this matter."

Last week, however, Comey announced he was leaving the Justice Department to become the general counsel of the defense contractor Lockheed Martin. In his absence, Associate Attorney General Robert McCallum is the most likely choice to be named as the acting deputy attorney general, and thus the man overseeing Fitzgerald's work. But McCallum has been a close personal friend of President Bush. Justice Department officials are once more grappling as to how to best assure independence for investigators. And Democrats on Capitol Hill are unlikely not to question any role in the leak probe by McCallum.

(Alberto Gonzalez, who succeeded Ashcroft as attorney general, had also?-like Ashcroft?-recused himself from the case. Gonzalez had overseen the response of White House officials to requests from investigators working the Plame case while he was White House counsel, and has also been a witness before Fitzgerald's grand jury.)

In the meantime, Fitzgerald's investigation appears to be in its final stages.

Nineteen months ago, when Comey appointed him as special prosecutor, reporters pressed Comey during the announcement as to what was behind his dramatic action. All that he would say at the time was: "If you were to speculate in print or in the media about particular people, I think that would be unfair to them."

Then he added, almost as an afterthought: "We also don't want people that we might be interested in to know we're interested in them."

Huffington Discusses Her 'Judy File' Sources and 'Plamegate'
Huffington Discusses Her 'Judy File' Sources and 'Plamegate'
Michael Kelley

Arianna Huffington
By Dave Astor
Editors & Publishers
Published: August 17, 2005 12:55 PM ET

NEW YORK Sources are at the heart of the Valerie Plame case. Sources are also a big part of Arianna Huffington's series of blog postings -- on HuffingtonPost.com -- about what she sees as New York Times reporter Judith Miller's less-than-heroic role in "Plamegate."

Huffington said her sources include journalists, social acquaintances of Miller's, general readers of the Huffington Post, and others. "But perhaps the most important category [of sources] is very serious, very responsible reporters within The New York Times who are worried about the paper linking itself so completely with Miller's fate," Huffington told E&P Online.

She also said "the mainstream media are having a hard time -- or are just uninterested in -- following the thread that the Miller story isn't just about the outing of Valerie Plame but about the misinformation campaign that led us into the Iraq debacle."

Plame, of course, was the undercover CIA operative outed in a Robert Novak column after Plame's husband, Joseph Wilson, questioned the Bush administration's rationale for invading Iraq. The July 27 opening salvo in Huffington's "Judy File" series of postings summarized what some Times people think (according to Huffington) is one possible "scenario" explaining Miller's involvement in Plamegate.

"It's July 6, 2003, and Joe Wilson's now famous Op-Ed piece appears in the Times, raising the idea that the Bush administration has 'manipulate[d]' and 'twisted' intelligence 'to exaggerate the Iraqi threat,'" wrote Huffington, who also does a column syndicated by Tribune Media Services (TMS). "Miller, who has been pushing this manipulated, twisted, and exaggerated intel in the Times for months, goes ballistic. Someone is using the pages of her own paper to call into question the justification for the war -- and, indirectly, much of her reporting. The idea that intelligence was being fixed goes to the heart of Miller's credibility. So she calls her friends in the intelligence community and asks, Who is this guy? She finds out he's married to a CIA agent. She then passes on the info about Mrs. Wilson to Scooter Libby. ... Maybe Miller tells Rove too -- or Libby does. The White House hatchet men turn around and tell Novak and [Matt] Cooper. The story gets out."

On Monday, appearing on the Lou Dobbs show on CNN, Miller's attorney, Floyd Abrams, fired back at Huffington, calling her charges that Miller may be covering up her own active involvement in the Plame scandal "preposterous." He declared that what Huffington "is concerned about, what she dislikes Judy Miller for, is not this, but earlier reporting she did on weapons of mass destruction. And because of that reporting, she refuses to give her the credit for acting out of the principle that animates her."

If the scenario Huffington wrote about has validity, why has much of the mainstream media portrayed Miller as heroic rather than compromised? And why has the Times stood by Miller, even before her jailing?

Answering the first question, Huffington told E&P Online: "The Judy-as-First Amendment-hero angle is the easy first response to the story. It's the conventional wisdom -- and the mainstream media like nothing better than going with the flow of the 'CW.' It's also the path of least resistance. ... Just hit the hot key on your computer and out pops the jailed-journalist-as-martyr story. It's much harder to swim against the current, to rethink, to reexamine, to reopen closed doors. And you risk stepping on toes -- maybe even the toes of people you socialize with."

Huffington added that this all means "a lot of distinctions aren't being drawn. For instance, as I posted yesterday, the Times' own ethical guidelines draw a clear distinction between protecting a source and granting anonymity to a source 'as cover for a personal or partisan attack.' Which, no matter what role you believe Judy Miller played, was clearly what happened in Plamegate. Then there is the distinction between safeguarding a whistleblower who helps unmask a powerful institution and safeguarding an illegal government leaker out to smear someone's reputation for political gain -- as happened in this case."

And, Huffington continued, "you really cannot separate the extent to which Miller's weapons-of-mass-destruction reporting played a part in backing the neocon agenda from the way in which her actions in the Plame affair are effectively protecting her neocon sources. The Plame scandal is not a separate issue from Miller's WMD reporting. Indeed, it occurred as part of her WMD reporting" -- which Huffington called "deeply flawed."

So why is the Times backing Miller? "That's the $64,000 question that, without exception, all my sources connected to The New York Times -- both those still at the paper and those no longer there -- are asking," replied Huffington. "The consensus is that Miller always played by different rules than other reporters. ..."

She added: "Don't forget the paper stuck with her even as her reporting on Iraq and WMD was being discredited. Indeed, when the paper ran its unprecedented editorial mea culpa in May 2004, her name was never mentioned -- even though she had penned four of the six articles that the paper was apologizing for."

Huffington did say that "if it wasn't for Plamegate, Miller's role at the paper would have been greatly diminished. But once the [Patrick] Fitzgerald investigation heated up, the Times felt it couldn't cut her loose at that point."

This Monday, the "Judy File" series also included the fascinating rumor -- still unconfirmed -- that controversial United Nations ambassador John Bolton may have visited Miller in prison.

Howell Raines Redux
Arianna Huffington
08.18.2005
Howell Raines Redux

As the New York Times' full-throated defense of Judith Miller hits new lows (Bob Dole brought in as a friend of the court?) the $64,000 question remains: Why is the paper linking itself so completely to Miller's fate?

"The thing you've got to understand," a source familiar with both Judy and the inner workings of the Times told me, "is that every big decision that comes out of the Times comes directly from the top. Nobody does anything there without Arthur Sulzberger's approval.

It's the larger, untold story in all of this -- that he now runs the newsroom."

Sulzberger, who succeeded his father as publisher in 1992 and chairman of the New York Times Co. in 1997, has been friends with Miller for a long time. But that doesn't seem to be the reason behind the unequivocal stance on Miller. "You have to understand something about Arthur," my source explained. "He's always unequivocal. He doesn't have another setting. You're either his friend or his enemy. He either supports you in an extreme, almost childish, way or he won't speak to you."

Sulzberger has clearly chosen the extreme support path when it comes to Miller. "There are times when the greater good of our democracy demands an act of conscience," he said after Miller was taken to jail. "Judy has chosen such an act in honoring her promise of confidentiality to her sources."

Directly contradicting this position is a former Timesman with impeccable journalistic credentials. Bill Kovach, the former Times Washington bureau chief, former curator of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard, and founding director of the Committee of Concerned Journalists, has publicly voiced what many in and around the paper are saying privately.

"When I was chief of the bureau in Washington," he told Sidney Blumenthal, "we laid down a rule to the reporters that when they wanted to establish anonymity they had to lay out ground rules that if anything the source said was damaging, false or damaged the credibility of the newspaper we would identify them. If a man damages your credibility, why not lay the blame where it belongs? Whoever was leaking that information to Novak, Cooper or Judy Miller was doing it with malice aforethought, trying to set up a deceptive circumstance. That would invalidate any promise of confidentiality. You wouldn't protect a source for telling lies or using you to mislead your audience. That changes everything. Any reporter that puts themselves or a news organization in that position is making a big mistake."

Apparently, Sulzberger is furious with Kovach for these remarks.

Of course, Times higher-ups sticking up for Miller is nothing new. According to another knowledgeable source, Judy was always allowed to play by different rules than other reporters: "She was given the license to operate without the normal editorial supervision, first in the Washington bureau and then later when she went to Baghdad".

This special treatment continued even as her reporting on Iraq and WMD was being discredited. First, her name was never mentioned in the Times' unprecedented May 2004 mea culpa -- even though 4 of the 6 articles the paper was apologizing for included her byline. Then, those in charge refused to fire her, even after she continued to defend her WMD reporting and her disgraced top source Ahmed Chalabi on TV shows like Hardball long after the paper's mea culpa.

"I think the United States has underestimated Ahmed Chalabi," she said to Chris Matthews in December 2004, speaking of the man who had pocketed $340,000 a month from the Pentagon to provide information that turned out to be dead wrong, and who the Bush administration said had passed intelligence to Iran that could ?'get people killed'. This didn't deter Miller: "I think Ahmed Chalabi, despite everything that was done to him in May, the raid on his house, remains basically pro-democratic, pre-Western, pro-American."

After one such televised transgression, according to a source within the paper, "Judy was taken off the WMD beat. They were hoping she would quit after that -- but that's not understanding Judy. She was enraged and threw a fit -- then threw herself into covering the UN Oil for Food story. The problem was, some of the reporters in Paris working on the story wouldn't share a byline with her."

After the Jayson Blair scandal, it took a "third floor mutiny" of Times staffers before Sulzberger brought down the axe on Howell Raines. Who will the axe fall on this time?

There are those who believe that ultimately the Times' support of Judy Miller is predicated on the paper's need to change the subject and cleanse itself from the stench left by its misleading coverage leading up to the war -- which makes the Jayson Blair scandal, by comparison, seem ludicrously insignificant. And few acts of purification are more effective for a paper than one of its star reporters -- especially the one most responsible for the stench -- going to jail to (in PR theory) protect the First Amendment.

Earlier this week on Lou Dobbs, Floyd Abrams, one of the designated cleansers, said of me: "What she dislikes Judy Miller for is not this [her actions in Plamegate], but earlier reporting she did on weapons of mass destruction". Sorry, Floyd, nice try -- but the Plame scandal is not a separate issue from Miller's WMD reporting. Indeed, it occurred as part of her WMD reporting. It came about not only when the White House was under attack but when Miller herself was increasingly being attacked by critics for her deeply flawed dispatches. When she met with her anti-Plame source -- or sources -- she was not only still on the WMD beat, but still a true believer promoting the administration's lies about Iraq's non-existent WMD threat -- despite an avalanche of contrary information.

Has anyone making decisions at the Times bothered to connect these dots?

"Sulzberger is definitely not a stupid man," said a source who has dealt with him both professionally and personally. "But he lacks a sense of nuance and modulation -- and is very defensive. So all conflicts become about him. In his eyes, if you attack Judy Miller, you are attacking him."

The question is: has the Times learned any lessons from the Howell Raines reign?

Huffington has a personal beef with Miller and it shows. She isn't about principle in this matter and for sure would never go to jail on account of her stands for she doesn't seem to have any these days apart from self-publicity which isn't a crime.

The fact of the matter is that Miller is in jail and is supported by her organization. She clearly isn't above the law as Huffington has suggested in some other columns.

Why shouldn't journalist have some of the same privileged confidence status as do lawyers or priests? The issue surrounding Miller is far greater than the pettiness that Huffingtom has shown in most of her opinioned pieces. The matter touches the core rights of the freedom of the press. Without confidential sources, Nixon wouldn't have been exposed for the thief he was. Nor would have the Plame affair been exposed by Novak.

Then again Huffington isn't a journalist but a blogger.

Some might remember Vanessa Leggett, the freelance writer who was jailed in a federal detention center in Texas for 168 days for refusing to bow to a sweeping subpoena of confidential source materials. She received the prestigious PEN/Newman's Own First Amendment Award 2003. It might well be that Miller will be in line for the same award. That's one prize Huffington won't be in line for.

While privilege and First Amendment rights might render investigation more difficult, we can't sacrifice it on the altar of political convenience as much as we would like in order to resolve the Plame affair. It's great time for a federal shield law.

Vanity Fair rips Media's role in Plame Scandal coverup
'Vanity Fair' Rips Media 'Conspiracy' in Covering Up Role in Plame Scandal
By Greg Mitchell
editors and Publishers
Published: August 11, 2005 9:00 PM ET

NEW YORK In an article in the September issue of Vanity Fair (not yet online), Michael Wolff, in probing the Plame/CIA leak scandal, rips those in the news media -- principally Time magazine and The New York Times -- who knew that Karl Rove was one of the leakers but refused to expose what would have been "one of the biggest stories of the Bush years." Not only that, "they helped cover it up." You might say, he adds, they "became part of a conspiracy."

If they had burned this unworthy source and exposed his "crime," he adds, it would have been "of such consequences that it might, reasonably, have presaged the defeat of the president, might have even -- to be slightly melodramatic -- altered the course of the war in Iraq." In doing so they showed they owed their greatest allegiance to the source, not their readers.

And their source was no Deep Throat, not someone with dirt on the government -- the source "was the government."

So in the end, he concludes, "the greatest news organizations in the land had a story about a potential crime that reached as close as you can get to the president himself and they punted, they swallowed it, they self-dealt." And why did they do it? Well, "a source is a source who, unrevealed, will continue to be a source."

Even after the news first emerged last month that Rove had leaked to Cooper, the media still waited days to even ask the White House press secretary about it. It was a story, "in full view, the media just ignored."

The title of the Wolff article is "All Roads Lead to Rove."

Wolff mocks Time's Matt Cooper and Norman Pearlstine and can't seem to make heads or tails of "genuinely spooky" Robert Novak. He holds off full judgment on the Times' jailed reporter Judith Miller, while noting the "baloney" she retailed for the White House. But he pointedly notes, concerning Miller, that reporters are born "blabbermouths" and even when they don't write or print a certain story they are prone to "serve it up to everybody they know."

He closes with a frontal blast at the media, many members of which will soon be exposed, he predicts, for having "lined up for these lies" spun by the White House.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Greg Mitchell ([email protected]) is editor of E&P.

BBB
The republicans must secretely love Cindy Sheehan because she has single-handedly removed the criminal activities of Karl Rove from the front pages and cable TV.

BBB

Your claim that Huffington is motivated by other than principle is without any basis other than your personal opinion. More importantly though, your implication/assumption that an appropriate shield law would apply to unquestioningly to Miller in this case is not well considered.

The reasonable and understandable (and necessary) function of a shield law would be to protect whistleblowers. That is, to protect from retribution those who, for the common good, seek to make public their intimate knowledge of wrong-doing committed by those in positions of power and influence. Clearly, a sitting government is a fundamental locus of such power and influence.

Where a government official (no less than a tobacco company executive or scientist) is him/herself the individual who has violated a law or standard and is also the source of a reporter's knowledge of that wrongdoing, then the rationale for shield law protection of whistleblower sources evaporates.

Read Kinsley on the matter here

Aside from that, Huffington violates no item of journalistic integrity in concentrating her attention and pen (as many other journalists have as well) on Miller's lousy reportage of WOMD matters in the run up to the war and on the NYTime's seeming inability to hold her accountable. That this reportage served the purposes of the Bush administration's PR arm at the time is entirely relevant. As is (though Huffington does not mention it) Miller's long term romantic relationship with Chalabi.

Here's a decent rundown of those involved in the Plame leak and their roles:

http://www.thinkprogress.org/leak-scandal

I'm sorry, blatham, but all your talk about the relative merits of certain news reporters and agencies, and you can still call Huffington a "journalist"? What happened to your standards?

Hello blatham.

It is amusing that your spurious mind would limit shield laws to those who are whistleblowers and not journalists.

The kind of shield law I was referring to wasn't about whistleblowers but about those laws adopted in several states that give protection to journalists the same way lawyers or priests are protected under the law.

The journalist that you quoted (and I don't agree with his take) writes now for an organization in California. California like several other states has a shield law. The California Shield Law provides legal protections to journalists seeking to maintain the confidentiality of an unnamed source or unpublished information obtained during newsgathering. That law if it were federal probably would have kept Miller out of jail for contempt.

The law protects from the following:

· The source of any information. There need be no assurance or expectation of confidentiality.
· Unpublished information
· Specific information obtained during newsgathering but not disclosed to the public
· Includes "all notes, outlines, photographs, tapes or other data of whatever sort"
· Includes news gatherer's eyewitness observations in a public place
· Applies even if published information was based upon or related to unpublished information
· Protects only information obtained during newsgathering

It's somewhat quite different from your whistleblower diatribe. It's not an absolute protection.

Hufftington has had a solid and well articulated beef against Miller ever since the pre-Iraq war pieces where she wrote relying heavily on Ahmed Chalabi's information about WMDs and where NYT had to take it's distance. Many journalists and many administration officials under Bush's naïve take of the world relied on the spurious allegations of money hungry Chalabi about WMDs that turned out inexistent. And Huffington to this day in her savvy hungry self promoting-self has always decried Miller and the NYT.

She isn't a journalist. Huffington is just a savvy mouthpiece with a website. Her comments can only be taken with a huge amount of salt. And your own comments seem at best ill-informed and quite out of touch with the subject.

Well, you don't much like Huffington. That at least is clear.

You probably do not want to go on contending that this question has an obvious single answer upon which all journalists are in agreement because that is not so. Go to the Columbia Journalism Review, for example, and nose around on precisely this topic.

As regards Kinsley, where precisely does he get it wrong? He's as smart a writer as you have in the US press presently and casual dismissal seems a tad presumptuous.

The contention you make in your first sentence above is false, and quite misses the point. I made no such limitation. The point is rationale. The reasons we would desire protections for members of the press are precisely the same as those for protecting whistleblowers...to leave open the ability of those without power (or with relatively little power) to speak truth to those who do possess power and to the citizens who vest power, and to construct such legal protections for the greater common good.

You are right in that such protections cannot be absolute. Where you get it wrong, as it seems to myself, Kinsley and quite a few others, is in differentiating which cases ought to fall outside such protections and how Miller's case is an instance of these.

Hello Blatham

Your understanding of shield laws is quite Canadian. There is in fact no shield laws in Canada for either whistleblowers or journalists. You have some limited common law protection but it stops there.

While this allegation of mine isn't about a school fight of who's daddy has the bigger plexus, I would suggest that you might want to look at it with less then a closed mind.

I personally have nothing with Hufftington. I care little about her but will admit she can have at times good insights as we all can. She exposed Miller and basically all the Bush administration for the naïve take of convicted felon that Challabi was and his forlon info (I'll admit his conviction was in absentia and by a government all too often related to the Canadian Maher case). But her current spurious attacks on Miller have muddied the waters on the First amendment rights and you seem to like the mud thrown.

Investigative reporting and God knows that your CBC and other outlets are quite good at it, often relies on protecting a source. That protection is maudlin if the journalist might be threatened as Miller is for no other reasons that she may (or not) have confidential sources or information in a case where still nobody has been even accused.

The Miller affair whether you like her or not isn't much about her but rather about the principles that got her in jail in the first place. It's like saying you don't like the color of someone being thrown in jail ( a subject all too American). Whether Miller is liked or not isn't the issue. The issue is clearly: ought a journalist be in jail for protecting whatever source she has?

I think we all wish we all knew who leaked the Plame story and basically broke national security and destroyed one's career. But the gist of the issue is whether we want to undermine our fisrt amendment rights. I know I don't.

I made a mistake in my inference that Chalabi's conviction and Arar's case stemmed from the same country. It is Jordan that condemned Chalabi while Arar was detained by our "benevolent" ally Syria.

pngiruourd

I think you ought to have a federal shield law of the sort proposed by Dodd. But if it were written in such a manner as to afford protection to Miller in this instance, then it would be a foolish and counter-productive version of a necessary law.

Here's a portion of a discussion held on PBS Lehrer Newshour between Bill Keller of the NY Times and Steve Chapman of the Chicago Tribune. "Smith" is Terence Smith of the PBS staff...the full interview will be available on the PBS site. I've pulled it from here You can find lots more at Editor and Publisher, much in agreement with you. I'm not.

This may be your interpretation and short hand summation of the law, but I would be bothered by protecting journalists in this way. My initial stance was that of course journalists need to be able to protect their source and shouldn't be compelled precisely because of the limitation it would put on whistleblowers and the publics right to know.

But, the way it is stated above, a journalist could be protected from turning over a host of items critical to prosecution. The criminal could purposely give these items to a journalist knowing the journalist could not be compelled and that without them nothing could be proven.

A new wrinkle in the Plame affair?
A new wrinkle in the Plame affair?
Published: August 30 2005
UK Financial Times

An intriguing new theory has emerged in the case of Valerie Plame, the outed CIA operative.

The mainstream media has focused on Karl Rove, President Bush's chief political guru, as the source of the original story identifying Plame. The alleged motive was revenge against former ambassador Joseph Wilson, Plame's husband, an outspoken critic of the Iraq war.

Observer now hears a new angle on the story is circulating inside the Justice Department.

It involves Judith Miller, the veteran New York Times reporter currently languishing in a Virginia jail for refusing to reveal her source(s) in the Plame affair.

Many have assumed that Miller - who never actually wrote a story identifying Plame as an operative - is protecting Rove and/or other administration officials. But the missing link is that Miller is not a political reporter, but rather an investigative journalist who co-wrote a book on America's secret war against biological weapons and later published controversial articles on Iraq's effort to acquire weapons of mass destruction.

Now here's the twist: Plame herself is a CIA operative who also specialised in weapons of mass destruction and bio-terrorism. So did Miller get to know Plame while she was writing her book or even use her as a source for other WMD stories? Despite 56 days' imprisonment and a vociferous campaign to release her - Miller is staying mum.

But at some point, surely, the truth will come out.

Free Judy Miller
The NY Times is still trying to cover up for Judy Miller.---BBB

August 29, 2005
Free Judy Miller
New York Times

The New York Times reporter Judith Miller has now been in jail longer for refusing to testify than any reporter working for a newspaper in America. It is a very long time for her, for her newspaper and for the media. And with each dismal milestone, it becomes more apparent that having her in jail is an embarrassment to a country that is supposed to be revered around the world for its freedoms, especially its First Amendment that provides freedom of the press. Ms. Miller, who went to jail rather than testify in an investigation into the disclosure of an undercover agent's identity, has been in a Virginia jail 55 days as of today.

Last week a Paris-based journalists' organization called Reporters Without Borders sent around an impressive petition in support of Ms. Miller. It was signed by prominent European writers, journalists and thinkers including Günter Grass, Bernard-Henri Lévy, the French philosopher, and Pedro Almodóvar, the Spanish filmmaker. The text should be required reading for the judge, the prosecutor and the White House. "At a time when the most extremist ideas are gaining ground, and when growing numbers of reporters are being killed or taken hostage, arresting a journalist in a democratic country is more than a crime: it's a miscarriage of justice," they wrote.

That was only the latest of the petitions in support of Ms. Miller that have been pouring in from Americans like Bob Dole, the former Senate majority leader, and people outside the United States. In one particularly poignant case, reporters in Pakistan - Pakistan, mind you - took time out from their own battles to send messages of support.

It's time for the authorities who jailed Ms. Miller to recognize that continued incarceration is not going to sway a reporter who believes she is making a principled sacrifice. As Jack Nelson, a veteran journalist for The Los Angeles Times, wrote recently: "Without leaks, without anonymity for some sources, a free press loses its ability to act as a check and a balance against the power of government." He cited Watergate, Iran-contra and President Bill Clinton's lies about Monica Lewinsky. If Judith Miller loses this fight, we all lose. This is not about Judith Miller or The Times or the outing of one C.I.A. agent. The jailing of this reporter is about the ability of a free press in America to do its job.