NYT Reporter Miller Defends Her Refusal

NYT reporter Miller defends her refusal

http://www.myrtlebeachonline.com/mld...s/12817478.htm

PETE YOST
Associated Press
10/5/2005

WASHINGTON - New York Times reporter Judith Miller said Tuesday that if the federal prosecutor who sent her to jail doesn't bring criminal charges in his probe of the Bush administration, she will wonder why she spent nearly three months behind bars.

"If he brings indictments, if he has a very serious case, then I might have to say perhaps his zealousness with respect to this mission was justified," Miller said of Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald.

Miller's comments on CNN's "Lou Dobbs Tonight" were her first TV interview since her release from a federal detention facility on Thursday. The journalist had been jailed for refusing to cooperate in Fitzgerald's investigation.

The prosecutor has been looking into who leaked the identity of covert CIA officer Valerie Plame. The leaks occurred days after Plame's husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, suggested the Bush administration had twisted prewar intelligence on Iraq.

Miller defended her refusal, followed by her reversal after 85 days in jail, to testify about conversations with her source, Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby.

Miller said people wrote "lots of postcards saying I should testify" and saying that she was protecting the Bush administration.

"I knew and I know I wasn't covering for anybody," Miller said.

The journalist said her lawyers were unable to get Fitzgerald to agree long ago to limit the scope of his planned questioning of her conversations with her source.

"We had asked the special counsel over a year ago would he narrow his investigation to the source of his interest, the subject of interest; he wouldn't do it then," said Miller.

Miller, who spoke directly to Libby in September and was assured she could testify, said, "That's all I was trying to do, live with my own conscience and my principles." She made that comment in an interview with ABC's Barbara Walters.