I’m not one of the Plame Game afficionadi, but Tom McGuire is away this weekend, so I must think for myself rather than rely on him to analyze Judith Miller’s account of her grand jury testimony.
This is the testimony that Miss Miller went to jail to avoid having to give. She martyred herself for the sake of “protecting her source”, Vice Presidential chief of staff “Scooter” Libby. Yet now we learn from her own hand that she had nothing adverse to say about him: So far as she can recall, he didn’t “expose” Valerie Plame Wilson’s role as an undercover CIA agent (assuming arguendo that there was any role to expose), handled classified information “very carefully” and told her nothing beyond what sound like legitimate talking points concerning Joe Wilson’s mendacious account of his fact-finding trip to Niger. What in the world was there to protect?
Power Line hypothesizes that her motives had nothing to do with Scotter Libby. Rather, feared being asked about matters unrelated to the Plame affair. A paragraph of her story is quoted as supporting evidence:
Equally central to my decision [to go to jail rather than testify when first summoned] was Mr. Fitzgerald, the prosecutor. He had declined to confine his questioning to the subject of Mr. Libby. This meant I would have been unable to protect other confidential sources who had provided information - unrelated to Mr. Wilson or his wife [emphasis added] - for articles published in The Times. Last month, Mr. Fitzgerald agreed to limit his questioning.
The flaw in that theory is that Peter Fitzgerald is no Ronnie Earle. He isn’t likely to stray beyond his mandate, which is to investigate whether a crime was committed in connection with Mrs. Plame Wilson. Unless his authority has been secretly expanded, Power Line’s favorite idea, that he has been pursuing Miss Miller’s tipoff to a Moslem terrorist front group that was about to be raided by the FBI, can’t be correct. The quoted paragraph in fact makes no sense: Nothing within the scope of Mr. Fitzgerald’s inquiry is “unrelated to Mr. Wilson or his wife”. I suspect prevarication, aimed at distracting attention from the hollowness of the ostensible motives for the writer’s peculiar conduct.
Instead of hunting for strange, secret machinations here, I suggest a straightforward explanation: Judith Miller went to jail, because she wanted to be a First Amendment heroine and dramatize the “need” for a federal shield law to exempt the professional press corps from the ordinary duties of citizenship. A shield law is now making progress in Congress, she has attracted as much favorable publicity as she can reasonably expect, and the time has come to go back to work. I doubt that her prison ordeal was unbearable. Is any warden so dull-witted as to inflict discomfort on a New York Times reporter in his custody?
It’s worth noting that her actions did Mr. Libby, their ostensible beneficiary, no good. The natural presumption in many quarters was that Miss Miller wouldn’t “protect” him unless her testimony would be incriminating. So he had to endure months of groundless speculation, and the Bush Administration was tarnished by the sort of rumors and innuendo that never fade completely away. I doubt that she aimed at that outcome, but it probably didn’t displease the BDS sufferers at the Time one little bit.
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