Just file this one in the Hmmmmmmmmmm Department:
Ms. Miller spent 85 days in jail for refusing to testify and reveal her confidential source, then relented. On Sept. 30, she told the grand jury that her source was I. Lewis Libby, the vice president’s chief of staff. But she said he did not reveal Ms. Plame’s name.
And when the prosecutor in the case asked her to explain how “Valerie Flame” appeared in the same notebook she used in interviewing Mr. Libby, Ms. Miller said she “didn’t think” she heard it from him. “I said I believed the information came from another source, whom I could not recall,” she wrote on Friday, recounting her testimony for an article that appears today.
Whether Ms. Miller’s testimony will prove valuable to the prosecution remains unclear, as do its ramifications for press freedom. Yet an examination of Ms. Miller’s decision not to testify, and then to do so, offers fresh information about her role in the investigation and how The New York Times turned her case into a cause.
The grand jury investigation centers on whether administration officials leaked the identity of Ms. Plame, whose husband, a former diplomat named Joseph C. Wilson IV, became a public critic of the Iraq war in July 2003. But Ms. Miller said Mr. Libby first raised questions about the diplomat in an interview with her that June, an account suggesting that Mr. Wilson was on the White House’s radar before he went public with his criticisms.
And that’s a long, detailed account from her own newspaper, the New York Times. TMV has to go out for a bit so more on this later.
But we’ll say this: this case gets more and more curious. It is certainly QUITE unusual for a journalist to forget who gave them a KEY part of info in a major story — let alone one that has legal implications. Raw Story says Miller will take an immediate indefinite leave of absence and that some predict she’ll leave the paper.
If you read this piece, it’s clear the Times isn’t falling on its sword for Miller — and Miller’s not falling on her sword for the Times.
So, for whom is she falling on her sword? (We report and link. YOU decide…)