- Judith Miller's subpoena requested information about Libby. She and the Times have asserted she did not believe his waiver was uncoerced. This has been contradicted by Libby's lawyer, Joseph Tate, who says he assured reporters that Libby's waiver is valid. Details here
- Judith Miller's lawyers think Fitzgerald learned Miller had information because someone who testified before the Grand Jury told the Grand Jury she was one of the reporters he had spoken to about Wilson's trip.
- Judith Miller told Aaron Brown of Newsnight she didn't want to respond to the subpoena because she didn't want to be asked about other sources after she talked about the person named in the subpoena. She didn't want to be in Matthew Cooper's situation:
I felt that I didn't want to start to go down the road of testifying about someone who may or may not be a source, because, at this point, the focus of Mr. Fitzgerald's inquiry has been on one person. But, as we've seen from Matt Cooper, if you make a deal to discuss that one person who may or may not have given a voluntary waiver, what about what happens when Mr. Fitzgerald's target of interest or person of interest shifts?
And then there's another person and another person who comes under suspicion. And, eventually, somebody might actually get to one of your sources, if they haven't already. I just decided that the position has got to be, if I promised someone confidentiality, whether or not he was a source on a particular story, I'm not going to go in and testify about what that person told me. Otherwise, I can't do my job.
I think the question here is what kind of information did Judith Miller have that she's protecting by going to jail? I keep coming back to either a classified document or an oral report with classified information she received from an Administration official, probably someone in the Pentagon or a national security official, or someone in Cheney or Rice's office.
The possibilities:
- Cheney's staff or someone in the White House Iraq Group. Is it John Hannah, whom UPI reporter Richard Sale identified as being under Fitzgerald's microscope?
- Deputy National Security adviser Stephen Hadley
- National Security Council official Robert Joseph
- Someone in the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans, headed by Deputy Undersecretary of Defense William Luti
- Someone on the Defense Policy Board, chaired by Richard Perle and whose membership included James Woolsey and Newt Gingrich.
Who am I leaving out? No matter where I start, I always end up at the same place: with Cheney and Libby's visits to CIA headquarters to strongarm the analysts into finding information to support the Administration's position there were WMD's in Iraq. That's what led to the CIA's decision to send Wilson to Iraq. And when he didn't, it led to the Administration's attempt to discredit the CIA - and Wilson, by extension.
