home

Judith Miller Talks to Lou Dobbs

By Jeralyn, Section Valerie Plame Leak Case
Posted on Wed Oct 05, 2005 at 12:20:30 PM EST
Tags: (all tags)
Share This: Digg! StumbleUpon del.icio.us reddit reddit

New York Times reporter Judith Miller gave her first post-jail interview last night to Lou Dobbs on CNN. Crooks and Liars has the video.

Here's Judy the martyr (from the transcript, available on Lexis.com):

You know, Lou, I knew and I know they wasn't covering for anybody. I was protecting the confidentiality of the source to whom I had given my word. I was keeping my word. And until I knew that that source genuinely wanted me to testify, and I heard that from him, I was willing to sit in jail. I didn't want to be in jail, but I knew that the principle of confidentiality was so important that I had to, because if people can't trust us to come to us to tell us the things that government and powerful corporations don't want us to know, we're dead in the water. The public won't know....That's why I was sitting in jail. For the public's right to know.

Much more credible to me are her statements that a year ago, Fitzgerald wouldn't agree to limit the questions to Libby and the topic of the Valerie Plame leak. The subpoenas directed to her, upheld by the Court, bear her out on this. The Court of Appeals decision (pdf) described them as:

.... on August 12 and August 14, grand jury subpoenas were issued to Judith Miller, seeking documents and testimony related to conversations between her and a specified government official “occurring from on or about July 6, 2003, to on or about July 13, 2003, . . . concerning Valerie Plame Wilson (whether referred to by name or by description as the wife of Ambassador Wilson) or concerning Iraqi efforts to obtain uranium.” Miller refused to comply with the subpoenas and moved to quash them.

They asked not just for her conversations with Libby about Valerie Plame, but about Iraq trying to acquire uranium. By agreeing to limit the questioning to Libby and Plame, and not asking about other sources, she didn't have to tell who else, if anyone, she heard about Plame from. More importantly, she didn't have to answer questions about what she knew about the infamous false 16 words in the State of the Union address referring to Iraq trying to get uranium - and where she got the information.

Miller tells Dobbs she began asking Fitzgerald to limit the scope again in September:

The fact that you were able to constrain, your attorneys and you were able to constrain your testimony before t