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September 30, 2005
Will Scooter get the Boot?

That is what we all want to know now that this news is out:

(CNN) -- After spending 12 weeks in jail for refusing to name a source, The New York Times reporter Judith Miller testified Friday before a federal grand jury looking into a CIA leak case after her source gave her permission.

Miller appeared before the grand jury after her attorneys reached an agreement with prosecutors on the scope of her testimony, "which satisfied my obligation as a reporter to keep faith with my sources," she said in a statement.

"It's good to be free," Miller said after her release Thursday. "I am leaving jail today because my source has now voluntarily and personally released me from my promise of confidentiality regarding our conversations."

She did not identify the source.

Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, called Miller in prison September 19 to personally free her from the pledge of confidentiality, a move that apparently contributed to her release, Libby's attorney, Joseph Tate of Philadelphia, told CNN.

New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. said the newspaper supported Miller's decision to testify.

It will be interesting to see if Bush now honors his pledge to fire anyone responsible for this leak, AND perhaps more importantly, if there are prosecutions in the case.

The other question that will be asked is what Cheney knew about the leak, especially in light of accusations that Cheney pressured the CIA to provide WMD evidence to justify the Iraq War. This is another stinker...

In the meantime, I am sure Miller will get a nice fat book deal out of it...

Posted by David A at 08:45 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack (1) | 272 Words
July 28, 2005
Did Judith Miller start Plamegate?

This is some devastating Stuff! Is a lot of it conjecture, yeah it is, but it is brilliant conjecture. Read the whole thing here.

Not everyone in the Times building is on the same page when it comes to Judy Miller. The official story the paper is sticking to is that Miller is a heroic martyr, sacrificing her freedom in the name of journalistic integrity.

But a very different scenario is being floated in the halls. Here it is: 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." 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 (Newsday has identified

a meeting Miller had on July 8 in Washington with an "unnamed
government official"). Maybe Miller tells Rove too -- or Libby does.
The White House hatchet men turn around and tell Novak and Cooper. The
story gets out.

This is why Miller doesn't want to reveal her "source" at the White House -- because she was the source. Sure, she first got the info from someone else, and the odds are she wasn't the only one who clued in Libby and/or Rove (the State Dept. memo likely played a role too) but, in this scenario, Miller certainly wasn't an innocent writer caught up in the whirl of history. She had a starring role in it. This also explains why Miller never wrote a story about Plame, because her goal wasn't to write a story, but to get out the story that cast doubts on Wilson's motives. Which Novak did.

Hat tip Stephen, who just made Inside the Blogs on CNN!

Posted by David A at 03:32 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack (0) | 373 Words
 
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