Remember all the heartfelt remarks about Judith Miller principled refusal to cooperate with Patrick Fitzgerald’s Plame investigation? About how Miller was taking the honorable path, choosing incarceration in order to protect a source?<\/p>\n
Well, all of that’s over now<\/a>.<\/p>\n New York Times reporter Judith Miller was released from jail late yesterday and is scheduled to testify this morning before a federal grand jury investigating whether any government officials illegally leaked the identity of CIA operative Valerie Plame to the media, according to lawyers involved in the case.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n “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.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n I’m glad Miller’s out and willing to testify; it means the investigation is just about over. I can’t quite figure out, however, why Miller took so long to get to this point.<\/p>\n Libby’s waiver was signed way back at the beginning of the probe. Miller said it wasn’t legit because it was coerced by prosecutors. Libby’s lawyers reportedly told Miller’s lawyers that the waiver was sincere over a year ago, but she apparently wasn’t convinced. She only recently sought “clarification<\/a>.” Ms. Miller authorized her lawyers to seek further clarification from Mr. Libby’s representatives in late August, after she had been in jail for more than a month. Mr. Libby wrote to Ms. Miller in mid-September saying he believed that her lawyers understood during discussions last year that his waiver was voluntary.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n I’m probably missing something, but couldn’t Miller have sought “further clarification” from Libby a long time ago? Before<\/i> she’d spent a month in jail?<\/p>\n In either case, Scooter Libby, Dick Cheney’s trusted aide, returns to the center of Plame-related attention. This is hardly a surprise; Time’s Matt Cooper identified Libby<\/a> as one of his sources in August.<\/p>\n
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