Lewis Libby

Day by day, witness by witness, exhibit by exhibit, Patrick Fitzgerald, the prosecutor in the trial  read more »

The government put I.  read more »

WASHINGTON, D.C.—On Feb.  read more »

At long last, the fog of mystification generated by the Bush administration and the Washington media  read more »

Last night, NBC Nightly News reported Ari Fleischer's testimony from the Scooter Libby trial, in which the former press guy said he had sought immunity from prosecution because he had done the very thing that Libby is accused of doing: disclosed the fact that Bush enemy Joe Wilson's wife worked for the CIA—Fleischer said, to two reporters, including David Gregory of NBC. Fleischer's testimony hurts Libby because he said that he had learned as much from Libby himself some time before.

NBC should have reported whether its employee, Gregory, agrees with Fleischer's account (According to Fox News, the other reporter, John Dickerson of Time, disputes it).

To observe the Washington press corps is to wonder why so many people who don’t remember what happ  read more »

To observe the Washington press corps is to wonder why so many people who don’t remember what  read more »

How scary must the New York Times legal department be when Salon is forced to run a second and much-expanded correction to a story they've already corrected and removed from their site?

The crux of the correction, regarding a piece by Debbie Nathan on Kurt Eichenwald's internet-child-porn reporting, is an amplification of the right of the Times—and of you!—, as per federal law, to inadvertently view kiddie porn. (Here we come a-trolling, XTube.com!)

Even though Salon is The Transom's sworn life-long enemy, we'll admit it's clear they nobly did the right thing. Still, ya just can't help but feel terrible watching such a legal beat-down. Watching the Salon-Times legal department match-up is sort of like watching Condoleeza Rice and Scooter Libby mash a bag full of kittens.

Hours after I.  read more »

Hours after I.  read more »

On Sunday, April 9, the New York Times reported on page A1 that the Vice President's former Chief of Staff I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby had been authorized to leak to former Times reporter Judith Miller that Iraq was "vigorously trying to procure uranium" to produce a nuclear bomb.

The Times piece said that Libby was told to overstate the intelligence.

But on Wednesday, Libby filed a correction to accompany his original court filings (from which the Times had gotten its information). The correction explained that he was not told to oversell the intelligence. Details of the letter were made available to the media on Tuesday night, and The Washington Post ran a piece on Wednesday explaining Libby's correction.

The Times, however, did not publish the new Libby filing until today, because, as an Editor's Note points out in today's Times, a voicemail and an email with the information "went unnoticed." —Gabriel Sherman

Names appearing in the center section of Romenesko for April 6, as of 12:30 p.m., from bottom to top:

Couric, Goodman, Pickford, Couric, Brook Barnes, Katie Couric, Couric, Couric, Couric, Couric, Stanley, Walter [Cronkite], Couric, Chung, [Katie] Couric, Bill Carter, Couric, Couric, Vargas, Williams, Couric, Rooney, Schieffer, Couric, Matea Gold, Murphy, Bob, Bob Schieffer, Katie Couric, Jim Murphy, Schieffer, Couric, Couric, Schieffer, Cronkite, Katie, King, Schieffer, Walter Cronkite, Larry King, Larry King, Cronkite, Roger Cohen, David Barstow, Moore, Roger Moore, Libby, [Vice President Dick] Cheney, Murry Waas, President Bush, Judith Miller, Scooter Libby, Bush, Libby, Deborah Caulfield Rybak, Couric, Brian Montopoli, Couric.

"One person's whistleblower is another person's snitch," Judith Miller said last night. "And they all have to be defended. I was disappointed some of my fellow colleagues didn't see that."

Miller was making her first public appearance as a former New York Times reporter, in a panel discussion at a dinner hosted by the Media Law Resource Center.

The Miller saga is far from over--she may yet be a witness against her indicted snitch/whistleblower, former vice-presidential aide I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby. But the moving-on phase has begun for Miller and for the Times.

Thus Miller was speaking her piece--and posting more pieces on her Web site. Publisher Arthur O. Sulzberger Jr., after weeks behind a press-office veil of no-comments, is booked for Charlie Rose tonight, according to a Times source.

Last night's panel topic in the New York Sheraton ballroom was "Reporter's Privilege," but the first question of the night from moderator Terry Moran of ABC was about Miller's just-announced retirement. Sounding a theme from her farewell letter, Miller told the audience she "had actually become the news, and that's something that no New York Times reporter wants to be."

In the rear of the hall, Times reporter Katherine Q. Seelye was typing away on a laptop, writing a news story about the end of Miller's Times career.

"The Times is a great institution and a great newspaper," Miller said, "and I'm very happy with my career there. But it's time to do something else."

That something else has yet to be defined. Miler said she plans to take time off, now that her five-week standoff with the newspaper is over--"the break I was supposed to take when I came out of jail and never got."

In a Nov. 5 interview, Miller had said that she still has no book deal to write about her involvement in special prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald's leak probe--lamenting "bloggers who report I have a book deal that I don't have, that my publisher says I don't have, that my agent says I don't have, that my best friends say I don't have...To continue to print that, and to have The Los Angeles Times for example carry [Arianna Huffington's reporting] as if it is fact--that's not her problem, that's mainstream media's problem."

During last night's panel, Miller offered another piece of media criticism, saying she'd been "jumping up and down" in jail with frustration over the Times' lack of aggression in covering the leak case--even if the paper did have "a dog in the fight."  read more »

And she added that the press coverage had failed to adequately address the First Amendment aspects of her case.

"I think the media tends to be focused on the wrong issues when there is so much at stake," Miller said. "We take the First Amendment for granted. I don't think we can, given the judicial decisions that have been handed down. We're facing a serious crisis." --Gabriel Sherman

George W.  read more »

George W.  read more »

Whatever indictments may or may not have issued from the grand jury sitting in Washington by the pub  read more »

“What kind of reporter are you?” Judith Miller asked Don Van Natta Jr.  read more »

Of all the evidence that has emerged so far in the C.I.A.  read more »

Of all the evidence that has emerged so far in the C.I.A.  read more »

“What kind of reporter are you?” Judith Miller asked Don Van Natta Jr.  read more »

Last week, as reporter Judith Miller prepared to return to The New York Times newsroom—having  read more »

It didn't take 85 days, but Judith Miller was slow enough to cooperate with the New York Times team reporting on her case that some readers ended up missing the paper's long-awaited Miller coverage on Oct. 16.

The paper's two-story Sunday package--a 5,800-word account of Miller's role in the Valerie Plame affair and Miller's own first-person tale of her conversations with vice-presidential chief of staff I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby--missed the deadline to be included in the bulldog edition, 270,000 copies distributed nationally.

Deputy managing editor Jon Landman, who oversaw the reporting team, said the slipped deadline was a result of Miller's delaying. Throughout the previous week, Landman said, Miller gave conflicting signals about whether she would write a story herself or not.

"We didn't have her first-person account," Landman said. "We didn't have her perspective on things. We got it a little before noon [Oct. 14]. It was very frustrating.

"There was lots of off-and-on and on-and-off," Landman added. "And that was frustrating too."

The reporters on the story--Don Van Natta Jr., Adam Liptak, Clifford Levy and Janny Scott--had been working to complete a piece with or without Miller's participation, Landman said. But when Miller turned in her first-person piece late on the morning of Oct. 14, the reporters had to race to re-report details to reflect her assertions, with less than a day to spare before deadline.

Executive editor Bill Keller, who was traveling in China, reviewed a partial draft. Copy editors received the piece by 9 a.m. on Saturday, but it was too late to turn the package around for the noon bulldog close.

--Gabriel Sherman   read more »

Correction: The number of copies in the national bulldog edition was about 270,000, not 100,000 as originally reported in this item.

On Oct.  read more »

According to sources involved in the Judith Miller case, lawyers for Miller have turned over an additional, previously unreported batch of notes on the New York Times reporter's conversations with I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby to prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald. The notes, a source said, could significantly change the time frame of Miller's involvement with Libby.

After spending 85 days in jail for civil contempt, Miller testified before Fitzgerald's grand jury on September 30 and turned over one set of edited notes. Those notes covered a pair of conversations she had with Libby, the vice president's chief of staff, in July of 2003--shortly after former ambassador Joseph Wilson published a Times op-ed challenging the Bush adminstration's account of the evidence for Iraq's nuclear ambitions.

The appearance of that op-ed is generally seen as the event that triggered the leaking of the information that Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame Wilson, was a CIA employee, which led in turn to Fitzgerald's investigation. But a lawyer close to the investigation said that the new set of notes details earlier contact Miller had with Libby--possibly in May 2003, two months before Wilson's op-ed appeared.

The existence of the additional notes may be behind the Times' report today that Fitzgerald may call Miller back for additional testimony October 11.

Robert Bennett, a lawyer for Miller, declined to comment. Joseph Tate, the lawyer representing Libby, did not return calls seeking comment. Times lawyer George Freeman would not comment.

The presence of the undisclosed set of notes comes as the Times is seeking to quell internal and external criticism over a lack of transparency in the Miller case. In today's Times, executive editor Bill Keller said Miller's potential return trip to meet with Fitzgerald could further delay the Times' plans to publish an account of the Miller saga. Deputy managing editor Jonathan Landman, who has been tapped to edit the report, declined to discuss the state of the paper's Miller reporting.  read more »

"I'm not going to talk about it," he said.

--Gabriel Sherman

From today's White House press briefing:

Q: Do you stand by your statement from the fall of 2003, when you were asked specifically about Karl and Elliot Abrams and Scooter Libby, and you said, "I've gone to each of those gentlemen, and they have told me they are not involved in this"? Q: Do you stand by that statement? MCCLELLAN: And if you will recall, I said that, as part of helping the investigators move forward on the investigation, we're not going to get into commenting on it. That was something I stated back near that time as well. Q: Scott, this is ridiculous. The notion that you're going to stand before us, after having commented with that level of detail, and tell people watching this that somehow you've decided not to talk. You've got a public record out there. Do you stand by your remarks from that podium or not? MCCLELLAN: I'm well aware, like you, of what was previously said. And I will be glad to talk about it at the appropriate time. The appropriate time is when the investigation... Q: (inaudible) when it's appropriate and when it's inappropriate? MCCLELLAN: If you'll let me finish. Q: No, you're not finishing. You're not saying anything. You stood at that podium and said that Karl Rove was not involved. And now we find out that he spoke about Joseph Wilson's wife. So don't you owe the American public a fuller explanation. Was he involved or was he not? Because contrary to what you told the American people, he did indeed talk about his wife, didn't he? MCCLELLAN: There will be a time to talk about this, but now is not the time to talk about it. QUESTION: Do you think people will accept that, what you're saying today? MCCLELLAN: Again, I've responded to the question. QUESTION: You're in a bad spot here, Scott... [...] MCCLELLAN: I appreciate your questions. You can keep asking them, but you have my response. Q: Well, we are going to keep asking them. When did the president learn that Karl Rove had had a conversation with a news reporter about the involvement of Joseph Wilson's wife in the decision to send him to Africa? MCCLELLAN: I've responded to the questions. Q: When did the president learn that Karl Rove had been... MCCLELLAN: I've responded to your questions.  read more »

From the White House press briefing of July 5:

Q: If nobody has anything else, do you have anything on the birthday, anything at all? MCCLELLAN: He celebrated that last night. Q: He did? MCCLELLAN: Yes, he had a celebration - yes, they had some friends over to watch the fireworks and they had a birthday cake - Q: What kind of birthday cake? MCCLELLAN: I don't know. Q: Did she give anything? MCCLELLAN: I was down on the lawn with family and friends. Q: Was Don Evans there? MCCLELLAN: He was in town this weekend. Q: What did he get for his birthday. MCCLELLAN: I will see if there's any more to provide you. I think he might have taken a low-key approach to this birthday. Q: Why? Because of his age? Q: Did he see any of Live 8 concert? Did he see his friend, Bono, in the Live 8 concert at all? MCCLELLAN: We didn't talk about it.