Judith Miller’s boss says she misled newspaper

updated 10:16 p.m. ET Oct. 22, 2005

WASHINGTON - In the latest fallout from the CIA leak investigation, reporter Judith Miller and The New York Times are engaging in a very public fight about her seeming lack of candor in the case.

In an e-mail memo Friday to the newspaper’s staff , Executive Editor Bill Keller said Miller “seems to have misled” the newspaper’s Washington bureau chief, Phil Taubman, who said Miller told him in the fall of 2003 that she was not one of the recipients of a leak about the identity of covert CIA officer Valerie Plame.

Miller says Keller’s criticism is “seriously inaccurate.”

“I certainly never meant to mislead Phil, nor did I mislead him,” Miller was quoted as saying in a Times story Saturday.

According to a Times story on Oct. 16, Miller told Taubman two years ago that the subject of Bush administration critic Joseph Wilson and Wilson’s wife, Plame, had come up in casual conversation with government officials, but that Miller said “she had not been at the receiving end of a concerted effort, a deliberate organized effort to put out information.”

‘Entanglement’?
In recent weeks, Miller testified to the grand jury in the leak probe that she had discussed Wilson and his wife in three conversations with Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby in June and July of 2003.

Keller wrote that if he had known of Miller’s “entanglement” with Libby, he might have been more willing to explore compromises with the prosecutor who was trying to get her testimony for the criminal investigation into the leak of Plame’s identity.

Miller spent 85 days in jail for refusing to cooperate with Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald. She was freed on Sept. 29 when she finally agreed to testify.

Responding to Keller’s criticism, Miller told the newspaper, “I was unaware that there was a deliberate, concerted disinformation campaign to discredit Wilson and that if there had been, I did not think I was a target of it.”

“As for your reference to my ‘entanglement’ with Mr. Libby, I had no personal, social or other relationship with him except as a source,” Miller said.

Miller’s attorney, Bob Bennett, told The Washington Post that it was “absolutely false” to suggest she withheld information about a June 2003 meeting with Libby, saying the conversation hadn’t seemed like “a big deal at the time.”

Responding to Keller’s memo, Bennett said: “I am very concerned now that there are people trying to even old scores and undercut her as a heroic journalist.”

Bennett did not return calls by The Associated Press seeking comment.

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