After three month in jail for refusing to reveal her source in the investigation of the leak of the identity of a CIA agent, New York Times reporter Judith Miller has been released from jail.
Miller, 57, has been jailed for contempt of court since July 6 for refusing to testify about conversations with news sources. She was released from the Alexandria Detention Center shortly after 4 p.m. yesterday after her attorney Robert S. Bennett reached an agreement on her testimony with special prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald, according to two lawyers familiar with the case.
Miller had refused to testify about information she received from confidential sources. But she said she changed her mind after I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, chief of staff for Vice President Cheney, assured her in a telephone call last week that a waiver he gave prosecutors authorizing them to question reporters about their conversations with him was not coerced.
“It’s good to be free,” Miller said in a statement last night. “I went to jail to preserve the time-honored principle that a journalist must respect a promise not to reveal the identity of a confidential source. . . . I am leaving jail today because my source has now voluntarily and personally released me from my promise of confidentiality regarding our conversations relating to the Wilson-Plame matter.”
A noble idea perhaps, but something about this story doesn’t make sense.
But Joseph Tate, an attorney for Libby, said yesterday that he told Miller attorney Floyd Abrams a year ago that Libby’s waiver was voluntary and that Miller was free to testify. He said last night that he was contacted by Bennett several weeks ago, and was surprised to learn that Miller had not accepted that representation as authorization to speak with prosecutors.
“We told her lawyers it was not coerced,” Tate said. “We are surprised to learn we had anything to do with her incarceration.”
Tate said that he and Bennett then asked Fitzgerald whether their clients could talk without fear of being accused of obstructing the investigation, and were assured that Fitzgerald would not oppose them doing so. After the phone call from Libby on Sept. 19 or 20, Tate said, the lawyers wrote a letter to Fitzgerald indicating Miller accepted Libby’s representation that the waiver was voluntary.
In July, when Chief U.S. District Judge Thomas F. Hogan ordered Miller to jail, he told her she was mistaken in her belief that she was defending a free press, stressing that the government source she “alleges she is protecting” had released her from her promise of confidentiality.
If that’s the case, then why did Miller refuse to testify ? Is there someone else she’s protecting ? Was this just some big misunderstanding ?
Strange, very strange.
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