Secret Service Records Prompted Key Miller
Testimony
National Journal Group
By Murray Waas, special to National Journal
Thursday, Oct. 20, 2005
New York Times reporter Judith Miller told the federal grand jury in the CIA
leak case that she might have met with I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby on June 23,
2003 only after prosecutors showed her Secret Service logs that indicated she
and Libby had indeed met that day in the Executive Office Building adjacent to
the White House, according to attorneys familiar with her testimony.
When a prosecutor first questioned Miller during her initial grand jury
appearance on September 30, 2005 sources said, she did not bring up the June 23
meeting in recounting her various contacts with Libby, the chief of staff to
Vice President Cheney. Pressed by prosecutors who then brought up the specific
date of the meeting, Miller testified that she still could not recall the June
meeting with Libby, in which they discussed a controversial CIA-sponsored
mission to Africa by former Ambassador Joe Wilson, or the fact that his wife,
Valerie Plame, worked for the CIA.
When a prosecutor presented Miller with copies of the White House-complex
visitation logs, she said such a meeting was possible.
Shortly after her September 30 testimony, Miller discovered her notes from
the June 23 meeting, and returned on October 12 for a second round of grand
jury testimony. In this second appearance, Miller recounted details from her
June 23 meeting with Libby, with the assistance of her notes.
Bob Bennett, an attorney for Miller, confirmed in an interview that Miller's
October 12 testimony "corrected" her earlier statements to the grand jury
regarding the June 23 meeting. Bennett declined to provide specifics of
anything Miller said during either of her grand jury appearances, except to
say: "We went back on the second occasion to provide those additional notes
that were found, and correct the grand jury testimony reflecting on the June 23
meeting."
Bennett said that Miller's testimony is now "correct, complete, and
accurate."
Miller's grand jury testimony is considered to be central to Special
Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald's investigation into the leak that led to the
disclosure of Plame as a covert CIA operative. Libby's testimony is at odds on
key points with that of Miller and other witnesses, according to sources close
to the investigation and attorneys for individuals enmeshed in the probe.
Stan Brand, a respected Washington defense attorney who often represents
political figures in high-profile investigations, including those by special
prosecutors, said in an interview that he did not know the particulars
regarding Miller's testimony. But, speaking in general, he said: "What you tell
your client when they go before the grand jury, is that they should be
truthful, be thorough, and not hold anything back. You don't want to hide
anything or not disclose things to expose you to charges or even the perception
by the government that you haven't been forthcoming."
Regarding Miller specifically, Brand said that even if Fitzgerald were to
conclude that Miller had "a feigned memory loss," the special prosecutor was
unlikely to "make an issue out of this because he got what he wanted from her,"
and might still be dependant upon her as a witness during a potential
trial.
Miller was unavailable for comment for this article. Earlier in the week,
she returned a reporter's phone call and left a voice mail saying, "I can say
that I read you in prison" and that she was eager to talk and tell more of her
side of the story beyond what she had written in a first-person account of her
grand jury testimony that was published on October 16 in The Times. But Miller
did not return several phone calls later in the week.
Miller's personal account of her testimony appeared in The Times on the same
day as a long staff-written "examination of Ms. Miller's decision not to
testify, and then to-do so" that, the paper said, included "information about
her role in the [Plame] investigation and how The New York Times turned her
case into a cause."
Miller's first-person account, as well as the staff-written piece by Times
reporters, disclosed details on the June 23 Miller-Libby meeting, a second
meeting between Miller and Libby on July 8, 2003, and two conversations that
Miller and Libby had on July 12, 2003. Both accounts also reported details on
her two grand jury appearances.
In her personal account in The Times, Miller said only that she discovered
the notes on the June 23 meeting between her first and second grand jury
appearances. But neither her personal account nor the staff-written article
reported that Miller initially failed to disclose the meeting in her testimony
or that she was shown the Secret Service visitation logs.
Miller devoted two sentences to the circumstances surrounding her grand jury
testimony on the June 23 meeting and notes. "I testified in Washington twice,"
she wrote, "most recently last Wednesday after finding a notebook in my office
at the Times that contained my first interview with Mr. Libby. Mr. Fitzgerald
told the grand jury that I was testifying as a witness and not as a subject or
target of his inquiry."
The staff-written account, meanwhile, contained one sentence on the matter:
"She testified before the grand jury for a second time... about notes from her
meeting with Mr. Libby."
The staff-written account also said that Miller largely declined to provide
assistance to the three reporters who wrote it. "In two interviews," the story
said, "Ms. Miller generally would not discuss her interactions with editors,
elaborate on the written account of her grand jury testimony, or allow
reporters to review her notes."
The June 23, 2003, Miller-Libby meeting took place in the Eisenhower
Executive Office Building, formerly called the Old Executive Office Building.
Libby and Miller discussed Wilson's CIA-sponsored trip to Niger in which he was
looking into an allegation that Saddam Hussein sought to buy uranium in order
to build a bomb.
Fitzgerald has been investigating whether Libby, Deputy White House Chief of
Staff Karl Rove, or other Bush administration officials leaked classified
information on Plame's CIA employment in an effort to undermine the credibility
of her husband, Wilson, who had alleged publicly that the White House
misrepresented his findings to bolster the case to go to war with Iraq.
Both Libby and Rove had told the federal grand jury that they indeed had
conversations with reporters regarding Plame in which they suggested that
Wilson was not credible because he was sent on the mission at his wife's
suggestion.
But both men have denied that they knew that Plame was a covert CIA
operative when they spoke about her, or that they learned about her CIA
employment through classified information. Libby has reportedly told the grand
jury that he first learned of the information about Plame through discussions
with journalists. Rove testified that he was told the information about Plame
by Libby and journalists he spoke with as well.
The special prosecutor's probe was later broadened to examine whether
officials engaged in making false statements to investigators, perjury, or
obstruction of justice, when they denied or potentially covered up the original
source of their information.
Miller testified in her second grand jury appearance that it was during this
June 23 meeting that she and Libby first discussed Plame's CIA employment.
Miller's notes of that meeting contained the notation, regarding Wilson, "Wife
works in bureau?"
As National Journal reported on October 11, Libby also did not disclose the
June 23 meeting to investigators and the grand jury until he was pressed on the
issue.
In her account in The Times, Miller wrote: "I told Mr. Fitzgerald that I
believed this was the first time I had been told that Mr. Wilson's wife might
work for the CIA. The prosecutor asked me whether the word 'bureau' might not
mean the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Yes, I told him, normally. But Mr.
Libby had been discussing the CIA, and therefore my impression was that he had
been speaking about a particular bureau within the agency that dealt with the
spread of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons. As to the question mark, I
said I wasn't sure what it meant.... Maybe Mr. Libby was not certain whether
Mr. Wilson's wife actually worked there."
Another crucial contradiction between Miller and Libby involves their second
meeting on July 8, 2003, during which the two discussed Wilson and Plame. The
two met for a two-hour breakfast at the St. Regis hotel in Washington.
According to attorneys familiar with his testimony, Libby told the grand
jury that at the meeting he told Miller that Plame had something to do with
Wilson 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 about
her.
However, Miller testified and turned over notes from the July 8 conversation
to the grand jury that showed that Libby had told her that Plame worked for the
CIA's Weapons, Intelligence, Non-Proliferation, and Arms Control office.
Libby has told federal investigators, according to legal sources familiar
with his testimony, that he told Miller at the meeting that he had heard that
Wilson's wife had played a role in Wilson being selected for the Niger
assignment. But Libby testified regarding both the June 23 and July 8 meeting
that he had 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 Plame was
a CIA employee, he did not know whether it was true.
Miller's grand jury testimony as well her notes on the July 8 meeting
contradict Libby's version. Miller's notes indicate that Libby did indeed tell
her that Plame worked for the CIA. Her notes said, according to Miller: "Wife
works at Winpac." Asked for an explanation by the grand jury, Miller has said
she testified she knew that Winpac meant Weapons Intelligence,
Non-Proliferation, and Arms Control, a CIA unit.
Ironically, the information supplied by Libby turned out to be incorrect.
Instead of working for the analytic unit of the CIA, Plame actually worked for
the agency's covert side, the directorate of operations.
Miller also testified about telephone conversations she had with Libby
regarding Plame and Wilson on July 12, 2003. In her Times article she wrote of
a single phone call from Libby that day.
But telephone records presented to Miller during her grand jury testimony
indicate that she twice spoke with Libby on July 12, although one conversation
was brief, according to attorneys familiar with her grand jury testimony.
The first phone call lasted three minutes, the phone record indicated.
Miller testified that she believed she might have taken the call on her
cellphone in a cab, and told Libby she would soon talk to him after she arrived
home, although she was unsure of this, according to the sources familiar with
her grand jury testimony.
The second telephone conversation between Libby and Miller lasted for 37
minutes, according to telephone records examined by attorneys familiar with her
grand jury testimony. Miller told the grand jury that she believed that
telephone conversation took place after she had arrived at her home in Sag
Harbor, N.Y., although she was not entirely sure.
That conversation took place two days before Robert Novak published his
column on July 14, 2003, saying that Plame was a "CIA operative" and that she
had been responsible for sending Wilson to Niger.
Miller wrote in The Times that "before this call, I might have called others
about Ms. Wilson's wife. In my notebook I had written the words 'Victoria
Wilson' with a box around it, another apparent reference to Ms. Plame, who is
also known as Valerie Wilson.
"I also told Mr. Fitzgerald that I was not sure whether Mr. Libby had used
the name or whether I just made a mistake in writing in my own. Another
possibility, I said, is that I gave Mr. Libby the wrong name on purpose to see
whether he would correct me and confirm her identity."
"I also told the grand jury I thought it was odd that I had written
'Wilson,' because my memory is that I had heard her referred to only as Plame.
Mr. Fitzgerald asked whether this suggested that Mr. Libby had given me the
name Wilson. I told him I didn't know, and didn't want to guess."
If Libby had in fact provided Miller with Wilson's name, that would have
proved to be significant to the federal grand jury probe, because Libby himself
had testified that he never provided Miller with her name, according to
attorneys familiar with his testimony.
-- Murray Waas is a Washington-based journalist. His previous articles,
focusing on Rove's role in the case, Libby's grand jury testimony, and the
apparent direction of Fitzgerald's investigation, also appeared on
NationalJournal.com
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