Judith Miller, Matthew Cooper are out of options

June 27, 2005

The ongoing criminal investigation of the Bush White House (Plame Game) took an important turn this morning when the Supreme Court rejected appeals from Matt Cooper and Judith Miller.

The Supreme Court rejected appeals Monday from two journalists who have refused to testify before a grand jury about the leak of an undercover CIA officer’s identity.

The cases asked the court to revisit an issue that it last dealt with more than 30 years ago — whether reporters can be jailed or fined for refusing to identify their sources.

The justices’ intervention had been sought by 34 states and many news groups, all arguing that confidentiality is important in news gathering.

“Important information will be lost to the public if journalists cannot reliably promise anonymity to sources,” news organizations including The Association Press told justices in court papers.

Time magazine’s Matthew Cooper and The New York Times’ Judith Miller, who filed the appeals, face up to 18 months in jail for refusing to reveal sources as part of an investigation into who divulged the name of CIA officer Valerie Plame…. A federal judge held the reporters in contempt last fall, and an appeals court rejected their argument that the First Amendment shielded them from revealing their sources in the federal criminal proceeding.

The question now becomes: what will Cooper and Miller do? They can talk to U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald and disclose what they know about the criminal leak of an undercover CIA agent, or they can go to jail.

Stay tuned.

Let’s start the betting pool!

I’ll bet a dollar that, if they squeal, that they finger Karl Rove.

  • Time to out Rove. This shit should hit the fan verrrry nicely….just in time for more torture photos.

    Rove is a traitor and should be hung. Outing an undercover operative of the Government is treason.

  • I want to see Rove frog-marched out of the White House as much as anyone but isn’t a journalist’s ability to keep sources anonymous a good thing? The most famous anonymous source in recent U.S. history just outed himself. I’m a little shaky on the history (before my time) but would Watergate have gone down the way it did without Deep Throat?

  • Response to Smiley: Perhaps this case is different. The crime was the releasing Plamer’s name. To investigate Watergate, they did not need to know the source of information. To investigate the Plamer crime, they authorities need the source. The source is the criminal.

  • Re smiley’s question:

    My memory of exactly how Plame’s name was outed is hazy, but I think that it was just simply “thrown out there.” We’re not talking about her being outed in the context of investigative reporting like Watergate, where anonymous sources are essential, but rather the casual and gratuitous mention of a name.

    I do share your concern, though. Certain people may use this to muzzle the press. Of course, the press seems to be doing that just fine on their own!

  • The whole case for privilege for Miller and Cooper was ridiculously weak.

    Miller cannont really claim to be protecting a “source” since she never wrote a report on the subject. She heard a rumor. That’s it. Fitzgerald wants to know from whom she heard the rumor, a rumor she did not report in the pages of the New York Times.

    The ultimate source, the one, who might be criminally liable, is NOT going to be Karl Rove. That’s just an ignorant fantasy. And, not because Rove may not be a source in this story. But, Rove would not have known Plame’s identity, except if it had been illegally disclosed to him, by someone in the CIA. In short, if Rove had known, the cat was already out of the bag, the illegal disclosure had already taken place.

    I would presume that Libby, Cheney’s Chief of Staff, and, presumably, one of Novak’s sources, has told Fitzgerald that he, Libby, learned of Plame’s identity FROM reporters. The reporters were passing this information back and forth among themselves. And, the question for Fitzgerald is, who first learned of Plame’s identity as a consequence of a felonious disclosure.

  • I totally appreciate the right of confidential sources but in this case it isn’t so black and white. There are laws about outing of agents and someone leaked here name. That could have gotten her killed if she was in the wrong place at the wrong time and it could have serious reprocussions for her contacts. Miller and Cooper as well as the leaker have no right to put someone in harms way (or in the worse case scenario, get them killed) because they want to write a story or fight some ideological/political war.

    You can’t yell fire in crowded room, you can’t defame/libel someone, – free press, free speech and all those things in the Constution people try to use to protect themseves are not absolute.

    Plame and Cooper tried to finesses it and hope no one noticed – unfortunately someone did and they got called on it. I want them punished not because of Miller’s rather obvious position on the war but because one she broke the law and now she has to pay and two whoever the leaker is needs to be stopped before the leak things that are even worse.

  • The point is that it was columnist Robert Novak who revealed Valerie Plame as an agent, not Miller and not Cooper. This is an acknowledged fact. And yet no one dares to even suggest that he should be brought to trial, or even reprimanded. Why? The only reason I can imagine is that he has such massive files on everyone in Washington that he is untouchable, just like J. Edgar Hoover was back in his day. The prospect of having one’s own career go down in flames if one pressed the old man too much would be a potent protection indeed, wouldn’t it?

  • I’ve assumed that Novak is walking because he squealed.

    They hauled him in to the Grand Jury and he gave up everything he knew to save his ass. I’ve heard talk that maybe you could pursue a conspiracy angle against Novak but I’m not sure.

  • I almost never hear anyone mention that the source-protection thing is so whistleblowers can disclose anonymously without fearing retaliation from the powerful entity they work for (or otherwise know about). The Plame case is utterly different, in that the disclosure was obviously intended to advance a Bush agenda. Not to expose corruption, but to protect it. Not to get the truth out, but to deep-six it.

    -F.

  • Source protection is necessary to a free press. But we are talking about potential treason. Why The Dark Prince Novak has not had to face a grand jury, though, I do not understand,

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