WASHINGTON, 1 October 2005 — New York Times reporter Judith Miller testified before a grand jury yesterday, ending her silence in the investigation into whether White House officials leaked the name of a covert CIA operative, Valerie Plame.
Miller, free after 85 days in jail, spent more than three hours inside the federal courthouse in downtown Washington, most of it behind closed doors with a grand jury.
Miller arrived at about 8:30 a.m. at the courthouse as part of an agreement reached Thursday with Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald to disclose her conversations in July 2003 with Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby.
The hearing was closed to the public and the press.
Miller, 57, was jailed for refusing to testify about conversations with news sources. But she said she changed her mind after Libby 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.
Miller’s role had been one of the great mysteries in the leak probe. It is unclear why she emerged as a central figure in the probe despite not writing a story about the case.
In an interesting turn of events, Joseph Tate, an attorney for Libby, told reporters after Miller’s release that he told Miller’s attorney Floyd Abrams a year ago that Libby’s waiver was voluntary and Miller was free to testify. He said last night that he was surprised to learn that Miller had not accepted that representation as authorization to speak with prosecutors.
“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.”
Miller’s husband, famed New York editor Jason Epstein, was at his wife’s side at her release. Miller has been married to Epstein — who was the longtime editorial director at Random House and a founder of the New York Review of Books — since 1993.
Fitzgerald has been investigating whether senior Bush administration officials broke the law by knowingly leaking Plame’s identity to reporters as retaliation for an opinion article written by her husband, former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson. Wilson accused the administration of twisting intelligence about Iraq’s attempt to obtain weapons of mass destruction in the run-up to the war.
Plame’s name first appeared in a syndicated column by Robert D. Novak in July 2003, eight days after Wilson’s accusations.
Other reporters, including Matthew Cooper of Time magazine and Glenn Kessler of The Washington Post, provided limited testimony about their conversations with Libby after receiving what they said were explicit waivers of their confidentiality agreements.
In July, on the day he was scheduled to be jailed along with Miller, Cooper agreed to be questioned by Fitzgerald. He said his source, who turned out to be Karl Rove, President Bush’s close political adviser, had assured Cooper he had voluntarily provided a waiver of their confidentiality agreement.
In recent months, Rove’s role in the saga has become clearer. He testified that he discussed Wilson’s wife with Cooper and Novak but never mentioned her by name.
Lawyers involved in the case believe yesterday’s testimony by Miller could mark the end of an investigation in which more than a dozen Bush administration officials have testified before a federal grand jury or have talked to FBI agents involved in the nearly two-year-old probe. Bush was interviewed as part of the investigation.
Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. said that “as we have throughout this ordeal, we continue to support Judy Miller in the decision she has made. We are very pleased that she has finally received a direct and uncoerced waiver, both by phone and in writing, releasing her from any claim of confidentiality and enabling her to testify.”
— With additional input by the Associated Press.
