Category Archives: News Media

Is Woody Helping Scooter?

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On MSNBC, Chris Matthews is referring to Bob Woodward’s unnamed administration official as “Deep Throat II.” Please…

[Update: John Dean thinks DTII could be Ari Fleischer. He just said this to Keith Olbermann on MSNBC.

Update update: Raw Story says it’s Stephen Hadley.]

(If you’ve not been following the new Woodward/Plame angle, the details are here.)

Matthews speculates that DTII and/or Woodward came forward now in an attempt to take some of the shine off the Libby indictment. I don’t see how Woodward’s revelation makes any difference to the Libby indictment. Whether Libby was the first leaker or not doesn’t seem to me to matter to the charges. And as Maha reader Donna pointed out, Fitzgerald didn’t claim that Libby was the first leaker, just that he was the first official KNOWN to have leaked. The whole reason Libby was indicted is that he obstructed the investigation and prevented Fitzgerald from knowing stuff. So if they’re trying to manufacture a talking point, this seems a pretty lame effort.

On the other hand, righties have certainly based talking points on much less.

Howie Kurtz reports that Woodward apologized today for waiting two years to tell WaPo‘s executive about his connection to the Plame case. The editor, Leonard Downie Jr., has been all CNN and MSNBC today claiming that he was not angry with Woodward and that all was forgiven and he hopes Woodward keeps writing for the Washington Post.

Downie also said that three administration officials talked about Valerie Plame Wilson to Bob Woodward. Two have given releases for Bob to write about their conversation, and those two are Scooter Libby and Andy Card. But the third remains a mystery.

Update: See also first-rate rant by ReddHedd at firedoglake.

Sore Throat

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Jim VandeHei and Carol D. Leonnig report in today’s Washington Post that some “administration official” told Bob Woodward about Valerie Plame Wilson a whole month before Scooter Libby blabbed to Judy Miller et al.

In a more than two-hour deposition, Woodward told Special Counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald that the official casually told him in mid-June 2003 that Plame worked as a CIA analyst on weapons of mass destruction, and that he did not believe the information to be classified or sensitive, according to a statement Woodward released yesterday.

The unnamed official, not Bob Woodward, alerted Patrick Fitzgerald to this conversation on November 3. Woodward testified to a grand jury Monday. (So I guess Fitz got himself another grand jury, huh?) Woodward hadn’t bothered to tell even his editors at WaPo about what the official told him until last month.

WaPo held off reporting about Woodward’s testimony until today because they hoped the official would release Woodward from a confidentiality agreement. I guess that didn’t happen.

A spokesperson for Karl Rove says the official wasn’t Karl. And we have absolutely no reason to believe anything a spokesperson for Karl Rove says, do we?

Of course, there’s not much reason to trust anything Woodward says, either. According to Woodward, back in June 2003 he tipped off Walter Pincus of WaPo about Joe Wilson’s wife, but Pincus says that’s not so.

Woodward’s statement said he testified: “I told Walter Pincus, a reporter at The Post, without naming my source, that I understood Wilson’s wife worked at the CIA as a WMD analyst.”

Pincus said he does not recall Woodward telling him that. In an interview, Pincus said he cannot imagine he would have forgotten such a conversation around the same time he was writing about Wilson.

“Are you kidding?” Pincus said. “I certainly would have remembered that.”

Pincus said Woodward may be confused about the timing and the exact nature of the conversation. He said he remembers Woodward making a vague mention to him in October 2003. That month, Pincus had written a story explaining how an administration source had contacted him about Wilson. He recalled Woodward telling him that Pincus was not the only person who had been contacted.

Ol’ Bob seems confused about many things. As reported by Jane Hamsher at firedoglake:

Woodward isn’t just reluctant to criticize the Administration — he’s become the water carrier of choice. Schanberg doesn’t report the big, fat whopping lie that Woodward went on to tell in that interview, that he had seen the CIA damage report done on the Plame leak:

    They did a damage assessment within the CIA, looking at what this did that Joe Wilson’s wife was outed. And turned out it was quite minimal damage. They did not have to pull anyone out undercover abroad. They didn’t have to resettle anyone. There was no physical danger to anyone and there was just some embarrassment.

Two days later, the WaPo ran a story saying that no such CIA report was ever done. I guess that was the official answer as to what Woodward’s “news room colleagues” thought of his put-down of their efforts.

Larry Johnson went further:

    I have spoken to some people who are in a position to know. There has been damage. My source, however, declined to share classified information.

As Josh Marshall points out, this story shows that the integrity challenged Woodward, who has been pooh-poohing the Plame Wilson story all along, was part of it from the beginning.

Scooter’s lawyers are now claiming that this disclosure somehow exonerates their client.

“If what Woodward says is so, will Mr. Fitzgerald now say he was wrong to say on TV that Scooter Libby was the first official to give this information to a reporter?” Jeffress said last night. “The second question I would have is: Why did Mr. Fitzgerald indict Mr. Libby before fully investigating what other reporters knew about Wilson’s wife?”

Of course, if ol’ Bob was keeping this disclosure a secret even from his editors, how exactly was Fitz supposed to know about it? But Fitz is still shaking the trees; the Libby indictment is not just a result but is part of his tree-shaking strategy, no doubt.

We are left to wonder who the unnamed official is and why this person waited until after the Libby indictment to reveal the Woodward connection to Fitzgerald. Guesses?

Update–hack sighting: CNN just reported on this story. They exhumed Bob Barr, of all people, to interview about the Energy Task Force. Lame.

Judy Miller “Retires”

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MSNBC just announced that Judy Miller has “retired” from the New York Times. Reuters has a slightly different take:

New York Times reporter Judith Miller, a journalist at the center of the CIA leak controversy that led to the indictment of a White House aide, will leave the paper, the New York Times said on Wednesday.

Miller’s lawyers and the paper negotiated a severance package, terms of which were not disclosed. As part of the agreement, the paper will publish a letter from Miller explaining her position, The Times said on its Web site.

That doesn’t sound like “retired.” It sounds like “terminated.”

Miller, 57, who covered national security for The Times, had faced criticism for stories she wrote on weapons of mass destruction in Iraq that turned out to be based on faulty information supplied by Iraqi exiles.

According to The Times’ web site, Miller wrote in her letter, to be published in The Times on Thursday, that she had become a “lightning rod for public fury over the intelligence failures that helped lead our country to war” and wanted to leave the paper because she had “become the news.”

Executive Editor Bill Keller was quoted in The Times as saying the paper had been hurt by delays in “coming clean” over lapses in its reporting that supported U.S. allegations of Iraqi weapons programs, much of which was written by Miller.


Katharine Q. Seelye writes for the New York Times:

Lawyers for Ms. Miller and the paper negotiated a severance package, the details of which they would not disclose. Under the agreement, Ms. Miller will retire from the newspaper, and The Times will print a letter she wrote to the editor explaining her position. Ms. Miller originally demanded that she be able to write an essay for the paper’s Op-Ed page challenging the allegations against her. The Times refused that demand – Gail Collins, editor of the editorial page, said, “We don’t use the Op-Ed page for back and forth between one part of the paper and another” – but agreed to let her write the letter.

In that letter, to be published in The New York Times on Thursday under the heading, “Judith Miller’s Farewell,” Ms. Miller said she was leaving partly because some of her colleagues disagreed with her decision to testify in the C.I.A. leak case.

“But mainly,” she wrote, “I have chosen to resign because over the last few months, I have become the news, something a New York Times reporter never wants to be.”

She noted that even before going to jail, she had “become a lightning rod for public fury over the intelligence failures that helped lead our country to war.” She said she regretted “that I was not permitted to pursue answers” to questions about those intelligence failures.

I suspect she was not permitted to pursue “answers” because she had lost all “credibility.” Anyway, I hope she “enjoys” her “retirement.”

The critical question: Will her book advance reach six figures? That would have been possible a few years ago, but the book publishing biz is not all that flush these days.

Judy Miller Smackdown

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Crooks & Liars posts the text of a memo from editor Bill Keller to the New York Times staff.

Short version: I apologize for letting Judy Miller screw the New York Times.

Sample:

I wish that when I learned Judy Miller had been subpoenaed as a witness in the leak investigation, I had sat her down for a thorough debriefing, and followed up with some reporting of my own. It is a natural and proper instinct to defend reporters when the government seeks to interfere in our work. And under other circumstances it might have been fine to entrust the details — the substance of the confidential interviews, the notes — to lawyers who would be handling the case. But in this case I missed what should have been significant alarm bells. Until Fitzgerald came after her, I didn’t know that Judy had been one of the reporters on the receiving end of the anti-Wilson whisper campaign. I should have wondered why I was learning this from the special counsel, a year after the fact. (In November of 2003 Phil Taubman tried to ascertain whether any of our correspondents had been offered similar leaks. As we reported last Sunday, Judy seems to have misled Phil Taubman about the extent of her involvement.) This alone should have been enough to make me probe deeper. …

… if I had known the details of Judy’s entanglement with Libby, I’d have been more careful in how the paper articulated its defense, and perhaps more willing than I had been to support efforts aimed at exploring compromises.

It’s not just Bill Keller. Miller’s colleague Mo Dowd writes a column today (behind the bleeping subscription wall) that takes Judy down, although gently (for Dowd).

Shorter version: Somebody should have stopped her a long time ago.

Sample:

She never knew when to quit. That was her talent and her flaw. Sorely in need of a tight editorial leash, she was kept on no leash at all, and that has hurt this paper and its trust with readers. She more than earned her sobriquet “Miss Run Amok.”

Judy’s stories about W.M.D. fit too perfectly with the White House’s case for war. She was close to Ahmad Chalabi, the con man who was conning the neocons to knock out Saddam so he could get his hands on Iraq, and I worried that she was playing a leading role in the dangerous echo chamber that Senator Bob Graham, now retired, dubbed “incestuous amplification.” Using Iraqi defectors and exiles, Mr. Chalabi planted bogus stories with Judy and other credulous journalists.

Even last April, when I wrote a column critical of Mr. Chalabi, she fired off e-mail to me defending him.

When Bill Keller became executive editor in the summer of 2003, he barred Judy from covering Iraq and W.M.D. issues. But he acknowledged in The Times’s Sunday story about Judy’s role in the Plame leak case that she had kept “drifting” back. Why did nobody stop this drift?

Judy admitted in the story that she “got it totally wrong” about W.M.D. “If your sources are wrong,” she said, “you are wrong.” But investigative reporting is not stenography.

At the Los Angeles Times, Tim Rutten discusses the Keller memo.

Shorter version: Miller’s a liar.

Sample:

The Times is a great news organization with a newfound capacity for self-criticism and a demonstrated capacity to renew itself. Miller, the reporter, represents something far more persistent and pernicious in American journalism. She’s virtually an exemplar of an all-too-common variety of Washington reporter: ambitious, self-interested, unscrupulous and intoxicated by proximity to power. …

… As Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball reported in Newsweek’s online edition this week, Libby deceived Miller during that breakfast meeting when he told her — according to her own account — that a classified National Intelligence Estimate “had firmly concluded that Iraq was seeking uranium” for a nuclear bomb. In fact, it called reports of Baghdad’s purchase of African uranium “highly dubious.”

Miller makes no mention whatsoever of this in her evasive published account of their dealings; what does that make her?

Sloppy and reckless — but apparently something more….

…Given Miller’s demonstrable conviction that a true picture can be repainted in situationally convenient hues, it’s not hard to figure out whom you believe on this one. A line of poetry comes to mind:

And what is truth, said Pilate, and washed his hands.

Ouch.

Colbert King of the Washington Post suggests that Miller’s relationship with her sources was way too cozy.

Shorter version: The White House did a no-no, and Judy helped.

Sample:

…the CIA leak case belongs in a class of its own. The Bush administration, having denied any knowledge or involvement in the disclosure of Valerie Plame’s CIA affiliation, appears to be up to its eyeballs in the whole affair. But security transgressions, if that’s what they are, appear to extend beyond blowing an agent’s cover.

Last Sunday, the New York Times published reporter Judith Miller’s firsthand account of her grand jury appearance in connection with the leak case. According to Miller, the inquiry that special counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald conducted before the grand jury roamed beyond the disclosure of Valerie Plame’s name. Miller wrote that Fitzgerald, referring to Vice President Cheney’s chief of staff, asked “if I had discussed classified information with Mr. Libby, and I said I believed so, but could not be sure.” Miller said she told Fitzgerald and the grand jury that I. Lewis Libby treated classified material very carefully and that while he had not shown her any documents, “I thought I remembered him at one point reading from a piece of paper he pulled from his pocket.”

Miller does not have a security clearance, though she claimed she had one when she was embedded with a special military unit in Iraq two years ago. She later modified that statement to say she had signed a nondisclosure form with the military giving her temporary access to classified information under rules set by her military hosts, according to Thursday’s Times. At any rate, she no longer had authorized access to classified information after the Iraq assignment.

Before the release of the Keller memo, Jack Shafer at Slate was calling for an exorcism at the Times.

Shorter version: Miller should not only be dismissed from the Times, she should be drummed out of journalism.

Sample:

The Sunday Times account about Miller read alone paints her as an insubordinate, self-serving, and undisciplined menace you couldn’t trust to assemble entertainment listings let alone file national-security stories. Conceding in the Times piece that her WMD reporting was “totally wrong,” Miller proves she doesn’t understand how journalism works when she says, “The analysts, the experts and the journalists who covered them—we were all wrong. If your sources are wrong, you are wrong. I did the best job that I could.” That is a lie. Reporters aren’t conduits through which sources pour information into newspapers. And sources aren’t to blame if a reporter gets a story wrong. A real reporter tests his sources’ findings against other evidence in hopes of discovering the truth, something Miller was apparently loath to do. …

…Asking the Times to exhume Miller’s work and revisit the methods and practices that led to flawed WMD journalism at the paper isn’t a veiled way of asking that witches be arrested for burning at the stake. Journalistic standards were betrayed at the Times. It was the Times, not me, that stated in its May 26, 2004, mini culpa that “the story of Iraq’s weapons, and of the pattern of misinformation” is “unfinished business” and promised that the paper would “continue aggressive reporting aimed at setting the record straight.” Unless the paper wants to hear Judith Miller’s name yodeled with that of Walter Duranty on every occasion Times haters assemble, one last public exorcism must be conducted to drive out the demons forever.

Time will tell if the New York Times has actually learned anything from this mess. As I wrote here, the Times has a pattern of compromised reporting that predates the Bush Regime. Let’s see if they can remember how to cover news.

Update: More on MoDo from Steve Gilliard.

Semisoftball

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I’ve been watching MSNBC’s Hardball this week, even though I swore off a couple of years ago. Truly, it’s better than Six Flags. There are thrill rides–Chris Matthews and guests go swooshing through the murky depths of rightie disinformation, shoot up to a brief moment of clarity, then tumble down again. Long-debunked lies and some startling actual facts are on display. Frank Rich and Amy Goodman have been recent guests, accompanied by the usual sideshow freaks–e.g., Stephen Hayes, Victoria Toensing, and the alleged “reporter” Andrea Mitchell.

What’s made Hardball worth watching is Chris Matthews’s glimmer of a clue. No, really. The owner of one of the thickest skulls on television, in Billmon’s words, “kinda sorta gets it.” From Matthews’s MSNBC “blog”:

That’s the environment in which this whole thing may have been hatched. If there was law-breaking, it came out of the vice president and his people’s determination to protect themselves against the charge that they led us into a corrupt war, a war based on false pretenses.

That’s how hot this thing is.

If there are indictments, they’re going to be probably in the vice president’s office, they’re probably going to come next week and they are going to blow this White House apart.

It’s going to be unbelievable.

I think the people watching right now who are voters better start paying attention to this issue. It’s not just about whether somebody’s name was leaked, it’s about whether we went to war under false pretenses or not, whether people knew about that or not, and what they did when they were charged against that kind of offense against the United States.

It’s serious business.

This is not to say Tweety is entirely reformed. He and his guests remain fact-challenged about many things. For example, here is Andrea Mitchell on Tuesday’s program:

MITCHELL: I don‘t know that to be the case, but what I think people need to focus on, is the overall background of what was going on back then. This was a fight—an internal fight—between the CIA and Dick Cheney. And you can‘t overstate the case of how brutal that fight over who had the right interpretation over Saddam‘s weapons was.

And in that context, when Joe Wilson went on television with us and in interviews and said he had been dispatched by the vice president, you could understand why Dick Cheney and his people probably said no, we didn‘t send him. We had nothing to do with that, because, you know, whether Wilson was told or was simply inflating his own importance, he led people to believe, he said publicly, that he had been dispatched by the vice president.

And that was clearly not the case by every bit of reporting that I have been able to do. The vice president did not know that Joe Wilson had been sent. And so when Wilson said that, that is what set into motion all of these other events because that‘s when the vice president and his staff, presumably, tried to put out the word. Joe Wilson was not our envoy.

At TPM Cafe, Larry Johnson corrects the errors:

Gee Andrea, don’t you know how to read? Here is what Joe Wilson wrote on July 6, 2003:

In February 2002, I was informed by officials at the Central Intelligence Agency that Vice President Dick Cheney’s office had questions about a particular intelligence report. While I never saw the report, I was told that it referred to a memorandum of agreement that documented the sale of uranium yellowcake — a form of lightly processed ore — by Niger to Iraq in the late 1990’s. The agency officials asked if I would travel to Niger to check out the story so they could provide a response to the vice president’s office.

Got it! He did not write that Cheney sent him. Joe Wilson isn’t lying, Andrea Mitchell is. Moreover, when Wilson appeared on Meet the Press on July 6, 2003 with Andrea, he did not say what she claims he did. Here’s the relevant portion of the transcript:

MS. MITCHELL: But, in fact, many officials, including the president, the vice president, Donald Rumsfeld, were referring to the Niger issue as though it were fact, as though it were true and they were told by the CIA, this information was passed on in the national intelligence estimate, I’ve been told, with a caveat from the State Department that it was highly dubious based on your trip but that that caveat was buried in a footnote, in the appendix. So was the White House misled? Were they not properly briefed on the fact that you had the previous February been there and that it wasn’t true?

AMB. WILSON: No. No. In actual fact, in my judgment, I have not seen the estimate either, but there were reports based upon my trip that were submitted to the appropriate officials. The question was asked of the CIA by the office of the vice president. The office of the vice president, I am absolutely convinced, received a very specific response to the question it asked and that response was based upon my trip out there.

Shocking! Joe Wilson consistently said that the request originated with the Vice President and was passed to the CIA. Don’t stop there, that is also what the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence reported in July 2004.

Be sure to read all of Larry Johnson’s post, which corrects a number of other oft-repeated falsehoods.

By the way, if you’ve got a second, please send an email to Chris Matthews with a link to the Larry Johnson article. Be polite.

Matthews’s program still suffers from a misguided attempt to create “balance” by pairing up rightes and lefties and giving both points of view equal time and equal weight even if one side is either ignorant of the facts or lying its butt off. (Most mismatched couple: Kate O’Beirne and Bob Herbert, Hardball, October 12.) As someone, I believe Eric Alterman, once said, television producers seem to think “balance” means that if someone on your program says the earth is round, you have to give the views of the Flat Earth Society equal time and respect. As if there were no such thing as objective fact. Yes, people can have diverse opinions–e.g., the potential effects of proposed tax legislation or who’s going to win the World Series. But when Andrea Mitchell misquotes Joe Wilson and calls him a liar because of something he didn’t say, and the “host” sits and lets the lie pass without correction, that’s not “balance.” And it sure as heck isn’t journalism.

Indictments or Bust

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Jacob Weisberg joins the ensemble of wankers who believe the Fitzgerald grand jury is pointless. He takes his place beside veteran wankers Richard Cohen and John Tierney, of whom it can be said that putting his New York Times column behind a subscription wall is no loss. All three gentlemen argue that there’s no evidence anyone in the Bush Administration actually broke the law, ignoring the fact that no one other than the unleakable Patrick Fitzgerald and his secret grand jury have seen the evidence. But Weisberg also makes the remarkable argument that

Anyone who cares about civil liberties, freedom of information, or even just fair play should have been skeptical about Fitzgerald’s investigation from the start. Claiming a few conservative scalps might be satisfying, but they’ll come at a cost to principles liberals hold dear: the press’s right to find out, the government’s ability to disclose, and the public’s right to know.

I’ll pause and let you read that a few more times, so you can savor the full-blown, breathtaking idiocy behind that statement.

The press’s right to find out suggests an apology for Judy Miller and the New York Times. Find out what, pray tell? Even Judy’s editors were in the dark about what she was up to, but it’s clear that she was less interested in “finding out” than in protecting her own turf. Judy was not working to uncover possible misdeeds by government, but was a player in those misdeeds. She enabled the White House to lie to the American people. That’s not protected by the First Amendment, dear. (For another look at Judy, see Christopher Dickey’s web exclusive at Newsweek.)

The government’s ability to disclose–I can barely guess what Weisberg was referring to there. Careful reading of the remainder of the article leads me to think he was referring to subpoenaing reporters because they were the recipients of government leaks. But it appears the “leaks” were not disclosures, but misinformation intended to smear a critic of the Administration. Weisberg is defending the government’s right to bully and intimidate critics into shutting up, which I don’t think was the intention of the First Amendment.

And, finally, the public’s right to know. Know what? The party line? The propaganda du jour? How about (dare I say it) facts, Mr. Weisberg? How about getting to the bottom of a government conspiracy to manipulate the press and spread disinformation in order to deceive the public into supporting a war? I’d like to know more about that, sir.

Enough of that. Other Traitorgate news–David Johnston and Richard Stevenson of the New York Times write that Patrick Fitzgerald has no plans to issue a final report. This means we’ll either get indictments or nothin’.

Raw Story reports that John Hannah, “a senior national security aide on loan to Vice President Dick Cheney from the offices of then-Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security Affairs, John Bolton,” is “cooperating” with Fitzgerald and may have cut a deal.

The New York Daily News claims that President Bush “rebuked” Karl Rove when Bush found out about the leak, two years ago. Thomas M. DeFrank writes, “Bush was initially furious with Rove in 2003 when his deputy chief of staff conceded he had talked to the press about the Plame leak.” Buzzflash speculates that this is a story that was leaked to insulate Bush from Traitorgate fallout. But if the story is true, that means Bush has been in on the cover-up. Can we say “unindicted co-conspirator”? Stay tuned.

Speaking of Karl–Judy Miller wannabe Nedra Pickler of the Associated Press reports that Rove has cancelled three appearances before conservative groups.

See also yesterday’s Murray Waas report, which takes a closer look at Scooter Libby’s involvement in the mess.

The entire Traitorgate mess, some say, grew out of Dick the Dick’s war with the CIA over WMD intelligence. As part of that war, the White House installed Peter Goss as head of the CIA a year ago. Dafna Linzer of the Washington Post reports that this is not going well.

A year later, Goss is at loggerheads with the clandestine service he sought to embrace. At least a dozen senior officials — several of whom were promoted under Goss — have resigned, retired early or requested reassignment. The directorate’s second-in-command walked out of Langley last month and then told senators in a closed-door hearing that he had lost confidence in Goss’s leadership.

The turmoil has left some employees shaken and has prompted former colleagues in Congress to question how Goss intends to improve the agency’s capabilities and restore morale. The White House is aware of the problems, administration officials said, and believes they are being handled by the director of national intelligence, who now oversees the agency.

But the Senate intelligence committee, which generally took testimony once a year from Goss’s predecessors, has invited him for an unusual closed-door hearing today. Senators, according to their staff, intend to ask the former congressman from Florida to explain why the CIA is bleeding talent at a time of war, and to answer charges that the agency is adrift.

Another amazing Bush Administration appointment. Georgie Boy sure knows how to pick ’em.

Gray Lady Not a Lady Any More

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Today the Los Angeles Times takes the New York Times to task for its mishandling of Judy Miller. An editorial in today’s LAT accuses the NYT of “manufacturing a showdown with the government.”

The details of the Miller case (at least those that the paper has made public) reveal not so much a reporter defending a principle as a reporter using a principle to defend herself. There is still no satisfactory explanation, for instance, of why she changed her mind after 85 days in jail and decided to reveal her source.

Personally, I suspect the NY Times is on its way out as “the paper of record.” The Miller episode reveals very questionable standards of journalism, to say the least. And anyone (like a blogger) who routinely checks out stories from several different newspapers probably has noticed that other papers often do a better job. That, and the questionable business decision of putting popular content behind a subscription wall, suggest the Gray Lady is past her prime.

In today’s Salon (behind a subscription wall, naturally), Farhad Manjoo writes that Judy Miller’s unethical actions have created an internal mess at the New York Times that’s “bigger than Jayson Blair.”

On the one hand, it appears that Miller was not the source of Valerie Plame’s identity, as many speculated. However, Manjoo writes,

She protected — and, indeed, still looks to be protecting — people she knew were trying to discredit Wilson, even though they were possibly breaking the law, and even though she seems to have had no legal or ethical basis for doing so.

Judy Miller’s actions had less to do with protecting sources than covering her own butt.

Miller stonewalled the reporting team working on this case. Or, as the paper put it, “Ms. Miller generally would not discuss her interactions with editors, elaborate on the written account of her grand jury testimony or allow reporters to review her notes.” And that’s despite the fact that on Wednesday Judge Thomas Hogan lifted his contempt order, and Miller appears to be in no legal jeopardy in the case.

One Times staffer who spoke to Salon said her relative lack of cooperation with her colleagues is likely to continue to rankle the newsroom, even now that the story has been told. There doesn’t seem to be any sound journalistic reason for her selective silence; as Jay Rosen, the NYU journalism professor and blogger writes, “What principle of confidentiality extends to ‘interactions with editors?'”

Then there is the unbelievable fact that Miller cannot recall the most key detail in this incident, the source for Plame’s name. Discussions with some at the Times indicated that this would be the hardest pill to swallow for people there: Either Miller is lying, they said, or she’s sloppy to the point of ineffectiveness in her reporting. Neither scenario speaks for her continued employment as a star reporter.

There’s no excuse for any of that. And what were the Times editors thinking? The newspaper sank millions of dollars in Judy’s defense, yet the publishers and editors themselves had no idea what she was up to. And still don’t, apparently.

… it’s unclear why the Times allowed Miller — a reporter whose discredited work on weapons of mass destruction had recently embarrassed the paper — to be put in charge of the Times’ response to investigators looking into the Plame leak. Some revelations are astonishing: Apparently nobody at the newspaper asked to review Miller’s notes in the Plame case before allowing her to defy Fitzgerald, and before the paper’s management made her a high-profile symbol of press freedom in peril.

The Times account shows that senior management did not press Miller on her sources and what the sources had revealed to her about Plame, before backing her stance in public and in numerous editorials. It’s hard to imagine why they didn’t make sure she wasn’t being used by officials in the Bush administration who may have been breaking the law. Then there’s the matter of Miller’s own unethical actions: The Times’ report showed she lied to her editors about her involvement in the case, and maybe more disturbing, she agreed to allow Libby to hide his motives from readers by identifying him in two different ways. Why is she still working at the paper? (Unconfirmed reports say she has taken a leave of absence, but there’s no word of any disciplinary action against her.)

Rem Rieder writes in American Journalism Review:

Most disturbing is the sense that the Times at times is a ship without a skipper, or, better yet, an asylum run by the inmates. Strong leadership and editorial oversight seem hard to come by.

Take the almost casual way the paper decided to put itself at the center of such an important, high-profile legal battle – one that cost the paper millions of dollars and immeasurable credibility and trust. Yet Publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. and Executive Editor Bill Keller didn’t trouble themselves to find out much about Miller’s dealings with her confidential source, I. Lewis Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff.

In recent years, Rieder says, the Times has lurched from one debacle to another. In 1999 the Times embarrassed itself by running a series of articles on an alleged espionage ring run by a Los Alamos physicist named Wen Ho Lee. When the case collapsed, the Times said, um, maybe we should have asked better questions. Yeah, maybe. Then the paper helped buttress the Bush Administration’s claims that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, for which it offered a faint apology last year. And then there was Jayson Blair, who got away with plagiarism and fabrication for a remarkably long time.

Arianna Huffington writes that the Times editors should have noticed the flashing warning signs:

We now know that Miller’s bosses were being warned about serious credibility problems with her reporting as far back as 2000 — a warning that came from a Pulitzer Prize-winning colleague of Miller who was so disturbed by her journalistic methods he took the extraordinary step of writing a warning memo to his editors and then asked that his byline not appear on an article they had both worked on.

In today’s WaPo, Howard Kurtz quotes from a December 2000 memo sent by Craig Pyes, a two time Pulitzer winner who had worked with Miller on a series of Times stories on al-Qaeda.

“I’m not willing to work further on this project with Judy Miller… I do not trust her work, her judgment, or her conduct. She is an advocate, and her actions threaten the integrity of the enterprise, and of everyone who works with her. . . . She has turned in a draft of a story of a collective enterprise that is little more than dictation from government sources over several days, filled with unproven assertions and factual inaccuracies,” and “tried to stampede it into the paper.”

It’s the journalistic equivalent of Dean telling Nixon that Watergate was “a cancer on the presidency.” But while the Times corrected the specific stories Pyes was concerned about, the paper, like Nixon, ignored the long-term diagnosis. And, of course, the very same issues Pyes raised in 2000 — Miller’s questionable judgment, her advocacy, her willingness to take dictation from government sources — were the ones that reappeared in Miller’s pre-war “reporting” on Saddam’s WMD.

I think the Times management, from chairman Arthur Sulzberger on down, needs to think real hard about what it is a newspaper is for. One incident of compromised reporting might be forgiven, but the Times has developed a pattern. It may not be too late for the Times to mend its reputation, but it had better start doing so now. Else we’re going to be calling it the Gray Disreputable Woman.

Plame On

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In the past couple of days many have speculated that Patrick Fitzgerald must be looking hard at Vice President Cheney’s staff if not the Dick himself. Today in the Washington Post, Jim VandeHei and Walter Pincus confirm this.

As the investigation into the leak of a CIA agent’s name hurtles to an apparent conclusion, special prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald has zeroed in on the role of Vice President Cheney’s office, according to lawyers familiar with the case and government officials. The prosecutor has assembled evidence that suggests Cheney’s long-standing tensions with the CIA contributed to the unmasking of operative Valerie Plame.

In grand jury sessions, including with New York Times reporter Judith Miller, Fitzgerald has pressed witnesses on what Cheney may have known about the effort to push back against ex-diplomat and Iraq war critic Joseph C. Wilson IV, including the leak of his wife’s position at the CIA, Miller and others said. But Fitzgerald has focused more on the role of Cheney’s top aides, including Chief of Staff I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, lawyers involved in the case said. …

…Lawyers in the case said Fitzgerald has focused extensively on whether behind-the-scenes efforts by the vice president’s aides and other senior Bush aides were part of a criminal campaign to punish Wilson in part by unmasking his wife.

Josh Marshall writes that three points in this story stand out. First, Fitzgerald’s investigation has dug into Cheney’s running battle with the CIA regarding Iraq intelligence. Second, Fitzgerald said he would announce his findings in Washington and not in his office in Chicago; a hint that the end is at hand, perhaps? The third is this paragraph in the WaPo story:

The special prosecutor has personally interviewed numerous officials from the CIA, White House and State Department. In the process, he and his investigative team have talked to a number of Cheney aides, including Mary Matalin, his former strategist; Catherine Martin, his former communications adviser; and Jennifer Millerwise, his former spokeswoman. In the case of Millerwise, she talked with the prosecutor more than two years ago but never appeared before the grand jury, according to a person familiar with her situation.

Josh explains:

[Millerwise] was Cheney’s Press Secretary from 2001 to 2003. She then went to work on Bush-Cheney 2004. Then in January 2005 she was appointed Director of Public Affairs for the CIA. She had apparently also worked for then-incoming CIA-Director Porter Goss on Capitol Hill. And her installation appears to have been part of Goss’s effort to install Republican operatives in key positions at the Agency. Douglas Jehl, in the Times last January, called her appointment “the latest in a series of former Republican aides to be installed by Mr. Goss in senior positions at the C.I.A.”

Punchin’ Judy

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Judy Miller’s eagerly anticipated account of her grand jury testimony is published. Already there is enough commentary on the Blogosphere to fill a library.

And today there are new questions about whether Scooter Libby tried to keep Judy quiet. Pete Yost of the Associated Press writes today,

The dispute centers on year-ago conversations that the lawyer Cheney aide I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby had with one of Miller’s lawyers and on a letter from Libby to Miller last month regarding their talks in the summer of 2003 that touched on covert CIA officer Valerie Plame.

In urging her to cooperate with prosecutors, Libby wrote Miller while she was still in jail in September, “I believed a year ago, as now, that testimony by all will benefit all. … The public report of every other reporter’s testimony makes clear that they did not discuss Ms. Plame’s name or identity with me.”

One of Miller’s lawyers, Robert Bennett, was asked Sunday whether he thought Libby’s letter was an attempt to steer her prospective testimony.

“I wouldn’t say the answer to that is yes, but it was very troubling,” Bennett said on ABC’s “This Week.”

“Our reaction when we got that letter, both Judy’s and mine, is that was a very stupid thing to put in a letter because it just complicated the situation,” Bennett said.

“It was a very foolish thing to put in a letter, as evidenced by the fact that you’re highlighting it here,” Bennett said. “It was a close call and she was troubled by it; no question about it.”

In today’s Times, Miller wrote that she’d been questioned on this point [emphasis added].

During my testimony on Sept. 30 and Oct. 12, the special counsel, Patrick J. Fitzgerald, asked me whether Mr. Libby had shared classified information with me during our several encounters before Mr. Novak’s article. He also asked whether I thought Mr. Libby had tried to shape my testimony through a letter he sent to me in jail. …

…When I was last before the grand jury, Mr. Fitzgerald posed a series of questions about a letter I received in jail last month from Mr. Libby. The letter, two pages long, encouraged me to testify. “Your reporting, and you, are missed,” it begins.

Mr. Fitzgerald asked me to read the final three paragraphs aloud to the grand jury. “The public report of every other reporter’s testimony makes clear that they did not discuss Ms. Plame’s name or identity with me,” Mr. Libby wrote.

The prosecutor asked my reaction to those words. I replied that this portion of the letter had surprised me because it might be perceived as an effort by Mr. Libby to suggest that I, too, would say we had not discussed Ms. Plame’s identity. Yet my notes suggested that we had discussed her job.

Mr. Fitzgerald also focused on the letter’s closing lines. “Out West, where you vacation, the aspens will already be turning,” Mr. Libby wrote. “They turn in clusters, because their roots connect them.”

How did I interpret that? Mr. Fitzgerald asked.

In answer, I told the grand jury about my last encounter with Mr. Libby. It came in August 2003, shortly after I attended a conference on national security issues held in Aspen, Colo. After the conference, I traveled to Jackson Hole, Wyo. At a rodeo one afternoon, a man in jeans, a cowboy hat and sunglasses approached me. He asked me how the Aspen conference had gone. I had no idea who he was.

“Judy,” he said. “It’s Scooter Libby.”

That’s where Judy ends the article, btw. Very weird, if you ask me.

It seems to me Judy still has some ‘spainin’ to do; if not to Fitzgerald, then to the staff and readers of the New York Times. At Editor & Publisher, Greg Mitchell writes that the Times should fire Miller and apologize to its readers. Howard Kurtz writes at WaPo that the New York Times staff is upset and demoralized by the Judy Miller episode and doubt that the newspaper’s editors and executives are being, shall we say, transparent about what’s really going on. Be sure to read James Wolcott and Steve Gilliard, too.

Other commentaries of note:

Digby argues that the nature of the testimony must have caused Patrick Fitzgerald to at least consider the bogus WMD claims made by the Regime before the invasion.

Judy Hamsher at Firedoglake says Judy and Fitz must’ve played “Let’s Make a Deal.”

Arianna says it’s no clearer now exactly why Judy Miller went to jail.

John Aravosis at AMERICAblog writes that Libby undercut Bush.

Viveca Novak and Mike Allen write in Time that, if indicted, Karl Rove and other White House staff plan to either resign or take unpaid leave. This would apply to Scooter Libby as well. The article implies that this is Karl Rove’s plan, not President Bush’s plan, which seems odd. It’s as if they know the boss can’t make decisions; they have to be made for him.