In the National Journal, Murray Waas writes:
In two appearances before the federal grand jury investigating the leak of a covert CIA operative's name, Lewis (Scooter) Libby, the chief of staff to Vice President Cheney, did not disclose a crucial conversation that he had with New York Times reporter Judith Miller in June 2003 about the operative, Valerie Plame, according to sources with firsthand knowledge of his sworn testimony.
[. . .]
Libby also did not disclose the June 23 conversation when he was twice interviewed by FBI agents working on the Plame leak investigation, the sources said.Special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald apparently learned about the June 23 conversation for the first time just days ago, after attorneys for Miller and The New York Times informed prosecutors that Miller had discovered a set of notes on the conversation.
If it is true that Fitzgerald first learned of the June 23 conversation, not during Miller's testimony, but later, after Miller "discovered" notes on the conversation, couldn't the lead paragraphs just as easily highlight Miller's failure to disclose the conversation during her testimony?
Miller had spent 85 days in jail for contempt of court for refusing to testify before the grand jury about her conversations with Libby and other Bush administration officials regarding Plame.
The interesting part of Waas' article concerns the disclosure that Fitzgerald has recently "expressed significant interest in whether Libby may have sought to discourage Miller-either directly or indirectly through her attorney-from testifying before the grand jury, or cooperating in other ways with the criminal probe."
Can you say obstruction of justice?
According to Waas, the recently revealed June 23 meeting between Libby and Miller, their telephone conversations of July 8 and 12, and Novak's July 14 column occurred during an intensive period in which senior White House officials were scrambling to discredit Plame's husband, former Ambassador Joe Wilson.
I was puzzled by the public finger pointing between Libby's and Miller's attorneys over the adequacy of the waiver Libby provided to Miller. The finger pointing makes sense in light of Waas' reporting that Fitzgerald and his staff have expressed interest about the role that Libby and his attorney may have played in discouraging Miller from testifying in the Plame investigation.
Early on, Libby signed a waiver granting permission to any reporter to whom he talked to testify to Fitzgerald and the grand jury. This waiver was good enough for everyone but Miller, including Time magazine's Matthew Cooper, NBC Washington Bureau Chief Tim Russert, to allow them to testify about their conversations with Libby.
Miller refused to testify and went to jail until Libby gave Miller a personal waiver and subsequently telephoned her encouraging her to testify.
It seemed that Miller's lawyer was making much too much of the waiver, especially in light of all the other reporters testifying. But Waas writes about a September 12, 2005 letter Fitzgerald wrote a letter to Libby's lawyer:
In his letter, Fitzgerald said that Libby's and Tate's refusals to provide a more specific waiver for Miller led the prosecutor to have "assumed that Mr. Libby had simply decided that encouraging Ms. Miller to testify was not in his best interest." Three days later on September 15, Libby wrote Miller a personal letter urging her to testify, and then telephoned her again urging that she testify.
Any action taken or statements made by Libby found to be intended to discourage Miller from testifying might be construed to be an obstruction of justice.
It is still unclear why Miller went to jail; unclear why a waiver good enough for everyone else wasn't good enough for Miller. But it's no longer unclear why she got out of jail.
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