Reply #121: Reporter for Times Is Facing Jail Time

[coeur_de_lion]

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/08/politics/08leak.html?pagewanted=print&position=
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Oct 8, 2004
By ADAM LIPTAK

WASHINGTON, Oct. 7 - A federal judge held a reporter for The New York Times in contempt of court on Thursday for refusing to name her sources to prosecutors investigating the disclosure of the identity of a covert C.I.A. agent. The reporter, Judith Miller, published no articles about the agent, Valerie Plame. Even so, the judge, Thomas F. Hogan, of United States District Court in Washington, ordered her jailed for as long as 18 months, noting that she had contemplated writing such an article and had conducted interviews for it. Judge Hogan suspended the sanction until a planned appeal is concluded, and he released Ms. Miller on her own recognizance.

"We have a classic confrontation between competing interests," Judge Hogan said, speaking from the bench. "Miss Miller is acting in good faith, doing her duty as a respected and established reporter who believes reporters have a First Amendment privilege that trumps the right of the government to inquire into her sources." But Ms. Miller was mistaken, Judge Hogan ruled. "Miss Miller has no right to decline to answer these questions," he said. The investigation seeks to determine who told the syndicated columnist Robert Novak and other journalists that Ms. Plame was a C.I.A. official. A 1982 law makes it a crime to disclose the identities of undercover agents in some circumstances. Ms. Miller spoke briefly at the hearing, affirming that she would indeed refuse to answer questions about confidential communications.

Speaking to reporters outside the courthouse afterward, she said: "I'm very disappointed that I've been found in contempt of court for an article I never wrote and The Times never published. I find it truly frightening that journalists can be put in jail for doing their jobs." According to an earlier decision in the case, Ms. Miller conducted reporting about Ms. Plame and her husband, Joseph C. Wilson IV, a former diplomat. She contemplated writing an article, Judge Hogan wrote, but she never did. The investigation has its roots in an Op-Ed article Mr. Wilson wrote for The Times in July 2003. It was critical of a justification offered by the Bush administration for the war in Iraq.

Ms. Plame's identity was disclosed by Mr. Novak in his column eight days later. "Two senior administration officials," Mr. Novak wrote, identified Ms. Plame as "an agency operative on weapons of mass destruction." They spoke, he suggested in the column, in reaction to "the fire storm" that Mr. Wilson ignited. The federal appeals court here is likely to hear arguments in Ms. Miller's case in November, her lawyers said. The case has been put on a fast track, and a decision could come by the end of the year or in January. At the hearing Thursday, a prosecutor, Jim Fleissner, cited Branzburg v. Hayes, a 1972 Supreme Court case that, he said, required reporters to answer questions from grand juries about their confidential sources. The special counsel in the Plame investigation, Patrick J. Fitzgerald, had moved methodically and deferentially, Mr. Fleissner added, turning to journalists as a last resort.
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