'NY Times' Explores Role of Miller and Pincus in Plame/CIA Case

By: E&P Staff In its regular coverage of the Valerie Plame/CIA leak affair, The New York Times has not probed deeply into the involvement of its own jailed reporter, Judith Miller. Thursday, however, the paper offers some new details in a story by Douglas Jehl that mainly focuses on another oft-ignored figure, The Washington Post's Walter Pincus.

But Jehl didn't get much cooperation from his own paper.

Miller has refused to reveal her source. Pincus testified to the grand jury, but has not publicly revealed his source in the Plame leak.

Jehl reveals that at the time of the Plame leak, "Ms. Miller was working primarily from the Washington bureau of The Times, reporting to Jill Abramson, who was the Washington bureau chief at the time, and was assigned to report for an article published July 20, 2003, about Iraq and the hunt for unconventional weapons, according to Ms. Abramson, who is now managing editor of The Times.

"In e-mail messages this week, Bill Keller, the executive editor of The New York Times, and George Freeman, an assistant general counsel of the newspaper, declined to address written questions about whether Ms. Miller was assigned to report about Mr. Wilson's trip, whether she tried to write a story about it, or whether she ever told editors or colleagues at the newspaper that she had obtained information about the role played by Ms. Wilson."

The rest of the Jehl article seems to have been sparked by an article in the summer issue of the Nieman Reports. In it, Pincus "makes clear that his source had volunteered the information to him," something that people close to Karl Rove and I. Lewis Libby have said they did not do in their conversations with reporters.

Jehl observes that while Pincus has not identified his source to the public, a review of his own accounts "and those of other people with detailed knowledge of the case strongly suggest that his source was neither Karl Rove, Mr. Bush's top political adviser, nor I. Lewis Libby, the chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney, and was in fact a third administration official whose identity has not yet been publicly disclosed."