Murray Waas’s new report today (via the Daou Report) adds substance to the possibility — beyond reported conflicts between the testimony of Scooter Libby and Judith Miller about their conversations — that, as I wrote last Thursday:
Because of their less-than-forthright dealings with Judith Miller and her attorneys, Joseph Tate (Scooter Libby’s attorney) and Libby may find themselves accused of witness intimidation or tampering. Even if Patrick Fitzgerald, the special prosecutor in the CIA Leak case (aka Plamegate), does not press charges for witness intimidation, Tate may find himself the subject of a state or federal bar disciplinary investigation (depending on the jurisdiction).
Now, the problem that you and I have — and which I imagine that Fitzgerald must also have — is which of these liars to believe. Miller, whose next book should be titled I Have Ninety-Nine Faces, is being excoriated by the press.
Today’s L.A. Times reports that the Pentagon “raised doubts about Miller’s contention that she had a special security clearance that allowed her to report on the search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.” And, at one time, Miller had the gall to deny to the NYT’s “Washington bureau chief that anyone in the Bush administration had discussed Plame with her.” Then there’s her close “alliance” with Libby:
[S]ome of her colleagues and others said her relationship with Libby appeared too cozy.
They noted that Miller told how Libby asked her for an autographed copy of her book on biological weapons. And they were upset that Miller agreed to Libby’s request to be identified as “a former Hill staffer” instead of “a senior administration official.” …
Such an identification would have allowed Libby to take potshots at Plame without identifying the true source of the attacks. (LAT)
So Miller, as I’ve suspected, lied to her bosses and colleagues, and probably lies to everyone (except maybe her dog). But then there’s Scooter Libby, an avocational fiction writer, who exhibits the dissembling patter of a sociopath:
According to attorneys familiar with his testimony, Libby told the grand jury that … he told Miller that Plame had something to do with Wilson’s being sent on a controversial CIA-sponsored mission to Africa, but that he did not know that Wilson’s wife worked for the CIA or anything else …
However, Miller testified and turned over notes … that showed that Libby had told her that Plame worked for the CIA’s Weapons, Intelligence, Non-Proliferation, and Arms Control office. […]
Libby and Miller’s two-hour breakfast at the St. Regis Hotel in Washington, D.C., on July 8. Libby has told federal investigators, according to legal sources familiar with his testimony, that he told Miller … he had heard that Wilson’s wife had played a role in Wilson’s being selected for the Niger assignment. But Libby also testified that he never named Plame nor told Miller that she worked for the CIA, because either he did not know that at the time, or, if he had heard that Plame was a CIA employee, he did not know whether it was true. (“Waas)
We’re supposed to believe Libby told Miller that Wilson’s wife was involved in the Niger trip but he didn’t tell Miller that Plame worked for the CIA or even her name?
But — where’s the Excedrin? — what if Libby’s version is truer than Miller’s? (Or — don your tinfoil hats — what if it was Miller who told Libby about Valerie Plame’s identity?)
There’s this disturbing section on how Miller “interpreted” what Floyd Abrams, the NYT’s in-house counsel and a fame First Amendment attorney, told her … BELOW:
This is a bit complicated, but worth the patience required to read it:
Miller wrote in her Times account that Abrams also told her: “[Tate] was pressing about what you would say. When I wouldn’t give him an assurance that you would exonerate Libby, if you were to cooperate, he then immediately gave this, ‘Don’t go there, or we don’t want you there.’ ”
However, two individuals who are familiar with accounts that Abrams provided to as many as 10 others at The New York Times — including the newspaper’s in-house attorneys, executives, and senior editorial staffers — about his discussions with Tate, say that Miller might have misconstrued or misinterpreted what took place between Tate and Abrams.
These sources confirmed that Abrams told them that Tate said Libby’s waiver was coerced, that Tate provided Abrams with details of Libby’s grand jury testimony, and that Tate appeared concerned that Miller’s testimony might damage his client. But the sources said that Abrams explained that Tate was simply nonresponsive when Abrams declined to say whether Miller’s testimony would exonerate Libby.
“Floyd never said that Tate said anything like ‘Don’t go there,’ or ‘We don’t want you there,’ ” said one person who attended legal strategy meetings involving Abrams, The Times’ in-house legal counsel, and senior editorial staff as to how Miller might avoid jail. “Perhaps Judy extrapolated that, or misunderstood what happened.”
In an October 16 staff-written piece in The Times — separate from Miller’s personal account published the same day — the newspaper reported that based on what Miller was hearing from Abrams about Tate, Miller believed that “Mr. Tate was sending her a message that Mr. Libby did not want her to testify.”
Tate has adamantly denied Abrams’s account that Tate ever said or did anything to discourage Miller’s cooperation with Fitzgerald’s office or the grand jury. Tate has also denied Abrams’s other contentions that Tate attempted to pass along to Miller what Libby told the grand jury, or that he attempted to learn from Abrams what Miller’s testimony might be.
But Waas next points to two incidents that put our suspicions back squarely on Libby. Or do they?
[I]t is a later passage in the letter that is especially important to Fitzgerald, sources say. “Because, as I am sure will not be news to you,” Libby wrote to Miller, “the public report of every other reporter’s testimony makes clear that they did not discuss Ms. Plame’s name or identity with me, or knew about her before our call.”
In her Times account, Miller 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.”
Bob Bennett, an attorney for Miller, said in an interview that when he first read Libby’s personal letter, he knew that it was going to “be trouble” for his client. “I know that the letter bothered [Judy] and it bothered me,” Bennett said. “She might be soon testifying, and a prosecutor might construe that as an attempt to influence her testimony. It was more probably just sort of a dumb thing to put in a letter.”
Then Waas writes, “Finally, on September 29, the night before Miller was scheduled to testify before the grand jury, a source sympathetic to Libby [would that have been his attorney, Joseph Tate?] spoke to journalists for at least three news organizations to leak word as to what Libby himself had said during his own testimony.”
“Journalists at two news organizations declined to publish stories,” writes Waas.
Among their concerns was that they had only a single source for the story and that that source had such a strong bias on behalf of Libby that the account of his grand jury testimony might possibly be incomplete or misleading in some way.
But more important were concerns that a leak of an account of Libby’s grand jury testimony, on the eve of Miller’s own testimony, might be an effort — using the media — to let Miller know what Libby had said, if she wanted to give testimony beneficial to him, or similar to his. (There is no evidence that Miller did not testify truthfully to the grand jury.)
But, that night, a third news organization — the Washington Post “did post an account on its Web site of Libby’s testimony.” (Excerpt of WaPo story)
I guess, for the WaPo, a scoop is a scoop is a scoop.
In my piece last Thursday, I quoted from Waas’s Oct. 12 interview with Democracy Now!‘s Amy Goodman, in which he raised the possibility of witness tampering by Scooter Libby and his attorney Joseph Tate. In his Oct. 18 article, Waas concludes with these observations:
Dan Richman, a professor at Fordham Law School and a former federal prosecutor for the Southern District of New York, said in an interview that while he could not speak specifically about what occurred between Tate and Abrams, an “attorney encouraging a witness to withhold information from a grand jury when the witness had no right to withhold is engaging in obstructive behavior.”
Richman further noted that since current case law does not recognize the reporter-source privilege, “even if someone under investigation or their attorney were to contact a reporter simply to say that they expect that reporter’s promise of confidentiality to the source to be kept, anyone who made such a request could possibly have engaged in an obstruction of justice or witness-tampering.”
Make my scoop an almond mocha fudge with 23 indictments, please.
