It's Miller Time

Earlier this week, I wrote a piece analyzing the security clearances given to Judith Miller. During the course of that analysis, I wondered how the Times, her employer, could protect her so vehemently given her obvious complicity in a plot to out a CIA operative.

Well, here's the answer:

Times: Miller May Have Misled Editors
By JOHN SOLOMON, Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON - Judith Miller's boss says the New York Times reporter appears to have misled the newspaper about her role in the CIA leak controversy.

In an e-mail memo Friday to the newspaper's staff, Executive Editor Bill Keller said that until Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald subpoenaed Miller in the criminal probe, "I didn't know that Judy had been one of the reporters on the receiving end" of leaks aimed at Bush administration critic Joseph Wilson.

"Judy seems to have misled" Times Washington bureau chief Bill Taubman about the extent of her involvement, Keller wrote.

Taubman asked Miller in the fall of 2003 whether she was among the reporters who had gotten leaks about the identity of covert CIA officer Valerie Plame.

"Ms. Miller denied it," the newspaper reported in a weekend story.

Miller and Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, discussed Wilson and his wife, Valerie Plame, in three conversations in the weeks before the CIA officer's status was outed by columnist Robert Novak.

(Full Text of the E-mail here)

Now there's a lot of handwringing and buckpassing on Keller's part here, including the implication that he wasn't really up to speed as editor when this was all happening, but the facts seem pretty clear: Judith Miller was protecting the Bush administration ahead of the interests of either her employer or by extension, hers.

I mean, it's one thing to walk up to your editor and say, "I've got a source that I refuse to tell you who is telling me this," and quite another to say "No, I've never received any information from any source about this." The first is doing your job. The second is doing someone else's for them.

Now, I have friends who are long time friends of Miller's (from college) and they swear she's not like this, that she was always conscientious and truthful, yadayadayada....of course, these friends also support the war, and if there's ANY truth to the AIPAC concerns of the tinfoil hat brigade (which I seriously doubt...it sounds like the 21st Century version of the Bilderberg Group), these friends would be at the forefront of the pro-Israel movement in America.

Obviously, something has changed in her in forty years. Why would someone who works at the most respected newspaper in the world do something boneheaded like this? And why is she still working there?

Buh bye, Judy, don't let the door hit you on the way out...