Free Republic

WASHINGTON (AP) -- A federal appeals court said Friday it would release some of the documents it reviewed when deciding to force journalists to testify in the CIA leak investigation. The ruling followed a request by The Associated Press and Dow Jones, which asked for the release of the sworn statements Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald gave to justify subpoenas for New York Times reporter Judith Miller and Time magazine reporter Matthew Cooper in 2005. Fitzgerald wanted the reporters' help in his investigation of the leak of CIA operative Valerie Plame's identity to syndicated columnist Robert Novak. The news organizations argued...

The “Cooper Counts” are heard in court. Two of the five felony counts in the perjury and obstruction of justice case against Lewis Libby, the former chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney, are based entirely on a single phone conversation Libby had with Matthew Cooper, then a White House correspondent for Time magazine, on July 12, 2003. In federal court in Washington Wednesday, CIA leak prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald revealed his documentary evidence to support those charges — one count of perjury and one count of making false statements — and the evidence was this: had somethine and about...

WASHINGTON - Reporter Matt Cooper testified Wednesday he thought I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby had confirmed that a prominent war critic's wife worked at the CIA but acknowledged he never asked the White House aide where he'd heard that. Cooper, Time magazine's White House reporter at the time, became the second reporter to testify at the CIA leak trial that Libby was a source for their learning that Valerie Plame, wife of ex-ambassador Joseph Wilson, was a CIA operative. Libby claims he only told reporters he had heard that information from other reporters. Libby, ex-chief of staff to Vice President Dick...

WASHINGTON — Some journalists who made careers out of questioning government officials and bearing witness to history may soon find themselves answering questions from prosecutors as key witnesses in the CIA leak case. Ten or more reporters from some of the most prominent news organizations could be called to testify in the perjury and obstruction case of former White House aide I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby. It's rare enough for reporters to become witnesses. But the Libby case is even more unusual because journalists will be dueling witnesses -- some called by the defense team, some by prosecutors. "It will be...

The New York Times may not withhold reporters' phone records from a federal grand jury investigating an alleged leak of a pending government raid on two Islamic charities suspected of supporting terrorism, a federal appeals court ruled yesterday. A three-judge panel of the New York-based U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit ruled 2 to 1 that the Times has no First Amendment or other legal right to refuse a demand for the records from the grand jury in Chicago, which was empaneled by U.S. Attorney Patrick J. Fitzgerald. The government's interest in rooting out a possible crime outweighs...

WASHINGTON - A federal judge on Friday ordered Time magazine to turn over documents for a White House aide to use in his defense to perjury and other charges in the CIA leak case. ADVERTISEMENT The order by U.S. District Reggie B. Walton also said the New York Times might have to turn over some information but reduced the scope of documents the newspaper and other news organizations would have to provide to lawyers for the defendant, former top vice presidential aide I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby. Citing a lack of relevancy, Walton said that Judith Miller, a former Times reporter,...

There are eight blank pages in the public version of a decision the federal appeals court in Washington issued in February. The decision ordered two reporters to be jailed unless they agreed to testify before a grand jury investigating the disclosure of the identity of a C.I.A. operative, Valerie Wilson. What is in those pages is one of the enduring mysteries in the investigation. In a filing yesterday, the special prosecutor in the case, Patrick J. Fitzgerald, told the court that he had no objection to the unsealing of parts of those pages, and he gave hints about what they...

(CBS) A federal indictment alleges that Vice President Cheney's now-former chief of staff I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby committed perjury during, among other things, a conversation he had with Time magazine reporter Matt Cooper. Cooper says he's not so sure. Libby resigned Friday after he was indicted by a grand jury, accused of obstructing its two-year investigation of the outing of CIA agent Valerie Plame and lying about an effort to blow Plame's cover. Special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald said the CIA leak investigation is substantially complete, though "it's not over." Fitzgerald wouldn't comment about the possible involvement in the case of...

Although Fitzgerald has so far drawn a tight circle around Libby that may leave President George W. Bush's longtime alter ego, Karl Rove, bloodied but secure, the United States v. I. Lewis Libby has already reopened old wounds about why the U.S. went to war in the first place. In an unprecedented and awkward fashion, the case pits government officials against the reporters who cover them. And Fitzgerald's indictment sets the stage for either a trial next spring or a plea bargain that almost certainly would mean jail time for Libby. That possibility has already been discussed: a source close...

What did "Scooter" Libby say to TIME's Matt Cooper about Valerie Plame? It seems Matt Cooper and TIME don't even agree.

I was wet, smelling of chlorine. It was July 12, 2003, in Washington, a beautiful summer day, and I had just come back from swimming. All morning I had been trying to reach I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby for a cover story about both President George W. Bush's claim that Iraq had sought uranium in Africa and former Ambassador Joseph Wilson's controversial Op-Ed.

Libby indicted on obstruction of justice, false statment and perjury charge...

At the end of his long opinion on the jailing of Miller, which I have linked, Judge Tatel said that the reporters' privilege yields, in this case, to “THE GRAVITY OF THE REPORTED CRIME.”(My caps)I don't like Laurence O'Donnell, but he's stating a fact when he reports the following: "Judge Tatel’s opinion has eight blank pages in the middle of it where he discusses the secret information the prosecutor has supplied only to the judges to convince them that the testimony he is demanding is worth sending reporters to jail to get. The gravity of the suspected crime is presumably...

NEW YORK -- An anonymous tip that nearly landed Time magazine reporter Matthew Cooper in jail probably wasn't valuable enough to justify a promise of confidentiality, his editor said Tuesday. Speaking at a panel discussion in New York sponsored by Court TV, Norman Pearlstine, editor in chief of Time Inc., lamented that reporters covering Washington have become too quick to offer total anonymity in exchange for information. Confidentiality should be reserved for special circumstances, he said. "A 90-second conversation with the president's spin doctor, who was trying to undermine a whistle-blower, probably didn't deserve confidential source status," Pearlstine said.

Time Inc. editor in chief Norman Pearlstine, who made the controversial choice last summer to turn over the notes of a reporter threatened with jail for refusing to identify a source, is writing a book about anonymous sources. "Off the Record" is scheduled to be published by Nan A. Talese, an imprint of Doubleday, in 2007. In a decision that brought criticism from his peers in journalism, Pearlstine agreed to comply with a court order to turn over notes by Time reporter Matt Cooper. They were sought by a special federal prosecutor investigating who in the Bush administration leaked the...

...[N]ews organizations are trying to outwit a new generation of prosecutors and protect reporters and sources in what they believe to be an increasingly antagonistic environment. In some instances, news executives are issuing guidelines to educate and retrain their staffs about taking precautions to protect their notes and other source materials from being sought as evidence in legal cases. Some are also looking at technological fixes like heightened encryption and e-mail messages that expire after a period of time.... Several news organizations had already begun clamping down on the use of anonymous sources and tightening the rules for when they...

In a July 17 story, Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen of the Washington Post had to admit, in recapping White House statements about the Valerie Plame case, that White House spokesman Scott McClellan was usually careful to disavow involvement "in any illegal leak, though his public statements clearly left an impression of a White House aloof to the affair." This is the key to understanding White House statements about the case and the reported White House role. If you read the transcripts of McClellan's briefings, it is clear that McClellan had denied a White House role in a criminal disclosure...

Question: When you're hauled off to jail for contempt of court, don't you have to go through the standard booking process, which would include a mug shot? I ask because we haven't seen a mug shot for Judith Miller, and I'm a touch curious as to why.

The Bush administration is formally op posing the bipartisan effort on Capitol Hill to enact a federal shield law for journalists, calling it "bad public policy" that would create "serious impediments" to law enforcement. We understand the administration's sensitivity, given the Valerie Plame affair. But that position is just plain wrong. Like other news media organizations, we urged the Supreme Court to hear the appeals of subpoenaed journalists Judith Miller and Matthew Cooper in hopes the justices finally would clarify whether a federal right of confidentiality exists. The court declined — which meant that its last word on the subject,...

Matt Cooper called Karl Rove on July 11, 2003. In his TIME article, Matt Cooper wrote what he calls an honest accounting of his testimony to the Grand Jury, and the following is how Cooper described his call to Karl Rove on July 11. ROVE in TIME magazine: "Was it through my conversation with Rove that I learned for the first time that Wilson's wife worked at the CIA and may have been responsible for sending him? Yes. I'm not buying that. Granted, Robert Novak's column outting Valerie Plame didn't appear till July 14. But the State Department memo which...

Time magazine reporter Matthew Cooper, a key figure in the Karl Rove controversy, showed up at U.S. District Court on Wednesday. The grand jury investigating the leak was meeting, and it was expected Cooper would testify. He did not comment while entering the courthouse. Meanwhile, President Bush and first lady Laura Bush are standing by Rove, whose role in the leak of an undercover CIA officer's identity has prompted Democrats to call for dismissal of the president's top political adviser. Cooper wrote an article in 2003 in which he identified the officer as Valerie Plame. It was disclosed this week...

Was it Karl Rove, after all? Or is President Bush's long-time political adviser getting a bum rap, fueled by wishful thinking of administration critics? Nearly two years to the day after Robert Novak blew the cover of a CIA operative in a newspaper column, the mystery of who might have leaked the identity of Valerie Plame to Novak and other journalists only seems to be deepening. The latest tantalizing clue involves Rove and a conversation he had with a Time magazine reporter, Matthew Cooper, in the days before the Novak column appeared. The conversation was disclosed last week by Rove's...

<p>Last week two reporters whose sense of self-importance is exceeded only by the hubris of their owners (excuse me, publishers) faced being hauled off to the hoosegow. One of them, Matt Cooper of Time magazine, got a last-minute reprieve. But the other, Judith Miller of the New York Times, got carted off in handcuffs, toothbrush in hand.</p>

Wednesday, July 6, 2005; 1:07 PM WASHINGTON -- In a high-stakes battle over press freedom, two reporters face jail, possibly as early as Wednesday, for refusing to divulge their sources to a prosecutor investigating the Bush administration's leak of a CIA officer's identity. "Journalists are not entitled to promise complete confidentiality _ no one in America is," Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald told a judge. In court papers, Fitzgerald said the source of Matthew Cooper of Time magazine and Judith Miller of The New York Times has waived confidentiality, giving the reporters permission to reveal where they got their information. The...

Apparently unappeased by Time Inc.'s offer last week to turn over a reporter's notes related to confidential sources, special prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald filed tough-language legal papers yesterday arguing that Time magazine correspondent Matthew Cooper, as well as New York Times reporter Judith Miller, should go to jail for civil contempt. "Journalists are not entitled to promise complete confidentiality -- no one in America is," wrote Mr. Fitzgerald, speaking of the reporters' pledge to their sources. Mr. Fitzgerald was appointed by the Bush administration to investigate a government leak that exposed the identity of Central Intelligence Agency operative Valerie Plame...

WASHINGTON, July 1 - For nearly two years, the investigation into the leak of a covert C.I.A. officer's name has unfolded clamorously in the nation's capital, with partisan brawling on talk shows, prosecutors interviewing President Bush and top White House officials, and the imminent prospect that reporters could go to jail for contempt of court.

Robert D. Novak, the columnist whose unmasking of a C.I.A. operative prompted an investigation of who had given her name to him and others, expressed disappointment yesterday that two other reporters faced going to jail for not cooperating in the case. Novak on CNN's "Inside Politics" (cnn.com) But Mr. Novak, in an appearance on "Inside Politics" on CNN and in a subsequent telephone interview, once again refused to answer questions about what contact, if any, he had had with the federal prosecutor conducting the investigation or about what extent he might have cooperated in the case.

Plame Case May End With Criminal Going Free and 'Witnesses' Jailed There is now little expectation that the special prosecutor will succeed in identifying the person or persons who violated the law by revealing Valerie Plame's covert CIA identity to journalists. Meanwhile, Matt Cooper and Judith Miller are still on the hook. By William E. Jackson Jr. (March 23, 2005) -- A Washington week of interviews with numerous reporters and editors for national news outlets leaves one with a checkered perspective in the case of Valerie Plame and the two witnesses/defendants -- Matthew Cooper of Time magazine, who wrote about...

Time Magazine's White House correspondent Matt Cooper said he is still trying to find the right words to explain to his six-year-old son that "daddy might not be coming home for a while." In a talk at the Law School Tuesday evening, Cooper explained the details of a case that could land him behind bars. Last month a federal appeals court upheld a ruling that Cooper could face time in prison for refusing to reveal the name of a confidential government source who leaked the name of CIA operative Valerie Plame in 2003. Judith Miller of The New York Times...

Judith Miller, a reporter for the New York Times, and Matthew Cooper, Time magazine's White House correspondent, are contesting an October ruling by a federal judge that held them in contempt for refusing to cooperate with federal investigators looking into the outing of CIA operative Valerie Plame in July 2003.~snip~Cooper has been subpoenaed twice, agreeing to sit for a deposition and answer questions in August about conversations with a source who encouraged him to cooperate with Fitzgerald. Within days of that deposition, he was subpoenaed again to discuss what his lawyers described as "an expanded array of topics," triggering his...

NEW YORK A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. circuit heard arguments today on behalf of two reporters facing jail for refusing to reveal sources in the Valerie Plame case but took no action, according to Lucy Dalglish, executive director of Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, who attended the hearing. "They were highly skeptical," Dalglish said about the judges, who questioned lawyers on both sides of the case for more than an hour. "They had very probing questions of the government, but also wanted to know why journalists should have a privilege that...

Some prosecutors don't subpoena journalists at all because of the injury it may do to the First Amendment. In 1998, for example, former Attorney General Dick Thornburgh and Iran-contra independent counsel Lawrence Walsh told the American Journalism Review that they couldn't recall ever having subpoenaed a reporter. Thornburgh cited a very practical consideration for not subpoenaing reporters: "You don't want to get the media mad at you."

Isn't it amazing what a raft of federal subpoenas will do to concentrate the media mind? Back when columnist Robert Novak looked to be the main target of special federal prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald, our professional press ethicists were tut-tutting about how they'd never "hide" behind journalistic privilege to abet a "crime." But now that a federal judge has held Time magazine reporter Matthew Cooper in contempt for refusing to tell a grand jury the sources for his own Valerie Plame story, suddenly the eyebrows furrow and talk turns to the threat to the First Amendment. That threat is real. Right...

Time Magazine's Cooper Threatened with Jail for Not Revealing Source A reporter is being held in contempt of court and faces possible jail time, and another was earlier threatened by a federal judge with the same fate, after they refused to answer questions from a special prosecutor investigating whether administration officials illegally disclosed the name of a covert CIA officer last year. Newly-released court orders show U.S. District Court Chief Judge Thomas F. Hogan two weeks ago ordered Matt Cooper of Time magazine and Tim Russert of NBC to appear before a grand jury and tell whether they knew that...