Reporter jailed for refusal to name leak source

updated 3:00 a.m. ET July 7, 2005

WASHINGTON - Will the jailing of New York Times reporter Judy Miller scare people off from risking careers to tell reporters about government misdeeds? Or will Miller’s willingness to sit behind bars rather than name a confidential source embolden such whistleblowers?

As Miller was led from court to a jail cell Wednesday, news executives and observers debated those questions. Saddened by Miller’s fate, most feared sources will be less likely to talk; some hoped they will be reassured.

On the government side, U.S. District Judge Thomas Hogan, who sent Miller to jail for almost four months unless she recants and testifies, and prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald, who demanded her jailing, took pains in court to say they were not trying to deny reporters their sources.

Fitzgerald: 'Not a one-person effort'
Hogan noted he had let Miller remain free while she appealed up to the Supreme Court. He added that a Supreme Court decision 33 years ago that reporters could not always keep their sources’ names secret had not destroyed press coverage of government scandals, including Watergate.

“This is not a one-person effort,” Fitzgerald said. He pointed out that Hogan and the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals had agreed he had showed that Miller’s testimony was essential and not obtainable elsewhere. And the Supreme Court refused to hear Miller’s challenge to Hogan’s civil contempt of court citation.

“In the end, the law must be obeyed,” Fitzgerald argued, citing decisions by President Truman not to seize steel mills and by President Nixon to release Watergate tapes once the Supreme Court ruled against them.

“I do not view myself as above the law,” Miller told Hogan. “You are right to send me to prison.”

But she said she had an obligation to protect a confidential source: “I do not make confidentiality pledges lightly, but when I do I must honor them.”

Fitzgerald is investigating whether a crime was committed, and by whom, in the Bush administration’s leak of the name of undercover CIA officer Valerie Plame.

Columnist Robert Novak first published Plame’s name in July 2003, days after her husband, former U.S. Ambassador Joe Wilson, publicly disparaged President Bush’s rationale for invading Iraq. Administration detractors said the leak was designed to punish Wilson for his criticism by ending his wife’s undercover career.

Time magazine reporter Matt Cooper, who identified Plame after Novak, avoided the same jail term given Miller. Also held in contempt by Hogan for refusing to testify before Fitzgerald’s grand jury, Cooper shocked the packed courtroom Wednesday by announcing that his source had contacted him just hours earlier to give him specific, unambiguous permission to tell the grand jury about their conversations.

Miller never wrote a story naming Plame, and there’s been no official explanation why Fitzgerald wants Miller’s testimony. The court rulings upholding his effort have blacked out details of his reasons. New York Times’ attorney Floyd Abrams speculated Wednesday that “most likely somebody testified to the grand jury that he or she had spoken to Judy.”

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