How Judith Miller Lost My Support

By: Allan Wolper Judith Miller of The New York Times made a principled decision to go to jail rather than tell a grand jury what she and I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby discussed about the outing of CIA agent Valerie Plame Wilson. But Miller lost her standing nearly two weeks ago after spending 85 days in jail when she changed her mind and decided that Libby, chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney, truly wanted her to testify.

Miller made that decision even though New York Times officials and reporters concluded a year ago that Libby had been browbeaten into signing a waiver by the Bush Administration that permitted him to break his confidentiality agreement with her, and questions about the voluntary nature of later waivers remained.

?If someone is made to sign a form saying that he or she is a source then the agreement is no longer valid,? a Times reporter who worked on the story last year told me. ?And everything that the Bush White House has done indicates that is the case.?

The Times lawyers echoed that thought. ?There was no question the White House waivers were coerced,? George Freeman, an assistant general counsel for The Times, told me at the time, referring to all the waivers at the White House, including the one signed by Libby.

Now Freeman tells me Miller feels Libby is no longer being coerced. How does he know? Miller told him so, referring to a telephone conversation she had with Libby from her Virginia cell while his lawyers listened in, according to Newsweek.

It requires total brain lock to think that Libby, the chief of staff to Vice President Cheney -- and a promoter of the fiction that Iraq was filled with Weapons of Mass Destruction -- is in any way free from the influence of the White House.

Miller turned the WMD fiction into a front-page crusade for an American invasion of Iraq, making her supporters wonder whether the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist had become a stooge for The Bush Administration. But she is also a terrific reporter. I doubt that the non-WMD Miller would believe one of her confidential sources had recanted a confidentiality agreement without at least interviewing him alone. Without looking into his eyes, observing his every movement, alert to every facial tic -- and then calling up a half dozen sources to check him out.

In this case, Miller had a newsroom full of some of the best reporters in the world who could do the legwork for her. But none of them were able to prove that the Libby of 2005 was any less coerced than he was a year ago.

Miller had been one of the few Washington reporters involved in
the Plame-Wilson outing case who had not accepted Libby?s claims that he was an independent agent.