Tuesday, October 04, 2005

How much of a whitewash will the Judith Miller story really be?


From this piece at Editor and Publisher:

The New York Times will carry what executive editor Bill Keller calls a full account of Judith Miller's involvement in the Plame case as early as this weekend, according to an article in the paper Tuesday.

"I know that you and our readers still have a lot of questions about how this drama unfolded," Keller told the staff members, who had gathered to greet Miller on her return to the newsroom on Monday.

Yeah, I have a question or two. How about clarifying this little snippet?

Miller was released from jail last Thursday after nearly three months and gave grand jury testimony in the Plame case on Friday. On Monday, she repeated that she felt she needed an explicit waiver from her source, whom she identified publicly for the first time as Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Vice President Cheney's chief of staff.

But the rabbit hole goes deeper. Libby had initially offered only a blanket waiver to reporters to testify, she said, not the personal and specific waiver he offered last week. But Libby's lawyer, Joseph Tate, has said Libby was prepared all along to provide a personal waiver to Miller.

So if that last part's true, why did Miller remain in jail for as long as she did? Somebody's lying here. And the last paragraph only makes things more confusing:

According to the Times article, "Ms. Miller said her lawyers reopened negotiations not because she wanted to leave jail, although she did, but because if Mr. Fitzgerald extended the grand jury, everyone would dig deeper into their positions and she would have a more difficult time getting what she considered a voluntary waiver from Mr. Libby."

But why would this be true, if Libby was prepared to give her that waiver all along? This just gets curiouser and curiouser.

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