Karl Rove may be the source of the leak

Buried in this article you will find various references to Karl Rove being the source that committed a federal crime by divulging the name of a CIA operative.

The New York Times
July 7, 2005
Reporter Jailed After Refusing to Name Source
By ADAM LIPTAK

WASHINGTON, July 6 - Judith Miller, an investigative reporter for The New York Times, was sent to jail on Wednesday after a federal judge declared that she was "defying the law" by refusing to divulge the name of a confidential source.

Another reporter who faced jail in the case, Matthew Cooper of Time magazine, was spared after announcing a last-minute deal with a confidential source that he said would allow him to testify before a grand jury.

Before being taken into custody by three court officers, Ms. Miller said she could not in good conscience violate promises to her sources. "If journalists cannot be trusted to guarantee confidentiality," she told Judge Thomas F. Hogan, "then journalists cannot function and there cannot be a free press."

Judge Hogan held the two reporters in civil contempt in October for refusing to cooperate with a federal prosecutor's investigation into the disclosure of the identity of a covert operative of the Central Intelligence Agency. The prosecutor's efforts produced the most serious confrontation between the government and the press since the Pentagon Papers case in 1971. The Supreme Court refused to hear appeals from the reporters last week.

On hearing Mr. Cooper's statement, Judge Hogan indicated he would lift the contempt sanction against Mr. Cooper after he testified.

After listening to Ms. Miller, the judge ordered her sent to "a suitable jail within the metropolitan area of the District of Columbia" until she decided to talk or until the term of the grand jury expired in October.

"I have a person in front of me," Judge Hogan said, "who is defying the law."

Ms. Miller appeared shaken and scared as she left the courtroom. In a telephone interview later in the evening, she said she had been taken to the Alexandria Detention Center in Virginia.

Ms. Miller, who conducted interviews but never wrote an article about the C.I.A. operative, joins a line of journalists who have accepted jail time rather than betray their sources' confidences. That tradition, according to Judge Hogan, does not deserve respect.

"That's the child saying: 'I'm still going to take that chocolate chip cookie and eat it. I don't care,' " the judge said.

Bill Keller, the executive editor of The Times, disagreed.

"The law presented Judy with the choice between betraying a trust to a confidential source or going to jail," Mr. Keller said after the hearing. "The choice she made is a brave and principled choice, and it reflects a valuing of individual conscience that has been part of this country's tradition since its founding."

On Friday, saying it was obligated to comply with a final court order in the case, Time turned over Mr. Cooper's notes and other documents to the special prosecutor in the case, Patrick J. Fitzgerald.

At the hearing here Wednesday, Theodore J. Boutrous Jr., a lawyer for Time, said Time's move should obviate the need for Mr. Cooper's testimony.

Mr. Fitzgerald opposed that request. "Mr. Cooper's testimony is essential," he said. "We need to get this right one way or the other, and we need Mr. Cooper to testify."

Judge Hogan rejected Time's request that he excuse Mr. Cooper from testifying. Indeed, the judge said, the reporters' failure to cooperate, until now a civil matter, may be considered criminal conduct.

"It could be seen to be obstruction of justice," Judge Hogan said.

Mr. Cooper then spoke directly to the judge, reading from a statement.

He said he had awoken Wednesday morning certain that he would continue to be in contempt and had said goodbye to his 6-year-old son. Time's actions, he said, did not absolve him from a promise he had made to his source. He added that a waiver form that his source had signed months ago did not affect his thinking.

Investigators have presented many government officials with waiver forms instructing journalists to ignore pledges of confidentiality. Mr. Cooper, Ms. Miller and other journalists have said they view such waivers as coerced and ineffective.

Mr. Cooper said his situation had changed earlier in the day.

"A short time ago, in somewhat dramatic fashion, I received an express, personal release from my source," Mr. Cooper said. "It's with a bit of surprise and no small amount of relief that I will comply with this subpoena."


Mr. Cooper's decision to drop his refusal to testify followed discussions on Wednesday morning among lawyers representing Mr. Cooper and Karl Rove, the senior White House political adviser, according to a person who has been officially briefed on the case. Mr. Fitzgerald was also involved in the discussions, the person said.

In his statement in court, Mr. Cooper did not name Mr. Rove as the source about whom he would now testify, but the person who was briefed on the case said that he was referring to Mr. Rove and that Mr. Cooper's decision came after behind-the-scenes maneuvering by his lawyers and others in the case.

Those discussions centered on whether a legal release signed by Mr. Rove last year was meant to apply specifically to Mr. Cooper, who by its terms would be released from any pledge of confidentiality he had made to Mr. Rove, the person said. Mr. Cooper said in court that he had agreed to testify only after he had received an explicit waiver from his source.

Richard A. Sauber, a lawyer for Mr. Cooper, said he would not discuss whether Mr. Cooper was referring to Mr. Rove, nor would he comment on discussions leading up to Mr. Cooper's decision.

Mr. Fitzgerald's policy is to refuse to respond to inquiries about the case.

Mr. Rove declined to comment on Wednesday.

In recent days, a lawyer for Mr. Rove has said that Mr. Cooper and Mr. Rove had a conversation not long before the name of the operative first became public. News articles referred to the operative by her maiden name, Valerie Plame, although she now goes by her married name, Valerie Wilson.

Mr. Cooper's involvement in the matter dates back two years, when he and two other reporters wrote an article for Time.com.

The article said "some administration officials" had told Time and the syndicated columnist Robert Novak that "Valerie Plame is a C.I.A. official who monitors the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction."

The article also noted that she is the wife of Joseph C. Wilson IV, a former diplomat who had recently written an opinion article in The New York Times questioning one of the rationales, concerning Iraq's weapons program, offered by the Bush administration for the Iraq war. Mr. Wilson based his criticism on a trip he had taken to Niger for the C.I.A.

On July 14, 2003, Mr. Novak wrote: "Valerie Plame is an agency operative on weapons of mass destruction. Two senior administration officials told me his wife suggested sending Wilson to Niger."

The Time article, published three days after Mr. Novak's column, suggested that the officials had "declared war" on Mr. Wilson and had released the information about his wife as a form of payback or in an effort to undermine the seriousness of his criticism by suggesting that his trip was a boondoggle.

Mr. Sauber said Mr. Cooper's agreement to testify was limited to a single conversation with a single source.

"It's not open season on Matt's sources," Mr. Sauber said, noting that Mr. Cooper had testified in the investigation on similar terms once before, after receiving the permission from I. Lewis Libby, chief of staff for Vice President Dick Cheney.

Reporters from The Washington Post and NBC testified after similar releases. Mr. Novak has refused on numerous occasions to discuss whether he provided information to Mr. Fitzgerald.

In her statement in court, Ms. Miller said she had received no similar permission from her sources.

"Your Honor," she said, "in this case I cannot break my word just to stay out of jail. The right of civil disobedience based on personal conscience is fundamental to our system and honored throughout our history."

She noted that she had covered the war in Iraq, and had lived and worked all over the world.

"The freest and fairest societies are not only those with independent judiciaries," she said, "but those with an independent press that works every day to keep government accountable by publishing what the government might not want the public to know."

Because Ms. Miller did not write about the Plame matter, it is not known precisely why Mr. Fitzgerald focused on her. But the prosecutor could have learned about her through phone records and the questioning of government officials.

Mr. Keller, The Times's executive editor, acknowledged that the case did not involve classic whistle-blowing.

"To paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld," he said, referring to the secretary of defense, "you go to court with the case you've got. It would be nice if there was absolute clarity about the nature of this case. On the contrary, there's immense mystery about this case."

Mr. Fitzgerald, who has relied on secret evidence in persuading courts to order Ms. Miller jailed, said the law now requires her to testify.

"The law says the grand jury is entitled to every man's evidence," he said. "We're doing our honest best to get to the bottom of whether a crime has been committed."

Mr. Fitzgerald's investigation is based on a 1982 law that made it a crime to disclose the identity of covert agents in some circumstances.

Robert S. Bennett, a lawyer for Ms. Miller, urged Judge Hogan to conclude that Ms. Miller would never talk, making confinement pointless.

Mr. Fitzgerald said no one could be sure that Ms. Miller would not talk until she was actually jailed.

"People change their minds," he said. "We saw here today that a source reached out to Mr. Cooper and caused him to testify. How do we know the same would not happen with Ms. Miller?"

In a statement, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., the publisher of The Times, said Ms. Miller had followed her conscience, with the paper's support. "There are times when the greater good of our democracy demands an act of conscience," Mr. Sulzberger said. "I sincerely hope that now Congress will move forward on federal shield legislation so that other journalists will not have to face imprisonment for doing their jobs."

Ms. Miller, speaking from the Virginia jail, said that her first hours in confinement had struck her as surreal but that the jail's staff had been professional and courteous. Her trip from the courthouse to the jail, she said, had brought home the gravity of her situation.

"They put shackles on my hands and my feet," she said. "They put you in the back of this car. I passed the Capitol and all the office buildings I used to cover. And I thought, 'My God, how did it come to this?' "

David Johnston contributed reporting for this article.