"Mr. Fitzgerald asked about a notation I made on the first page of my notes about this July 8 meeting, 'Former Hill staffer.'
My recollection, I told him, was that Mr. Libby wanted to modify our prior understanding that I would attribute information from him to a 'senior administration official.' When the subject turned to Mr. Wilson, Mr. Libby requested that he be identified only as a 'former Hill staffer.' I agreed to the new ground rules because I knew that Mr. Libby had once worked on Capitol Hill".
Here, Miller agrees not just to keep Libby's ID hidden, but to lie about that ID. This strikes me as a particularly egregious practice, worse than allowing him anonymity? Indeed, it emphasizes what I wrote in Forbes back in February: The idea of a journalist shield rule is to protect the anonymity of sources who fear retribution from the powerful, whether in government or business. Shielding the identity of a top government official who is using his anonymity to mislead play the press to his benefit turns the whole rationale on its head.
Here's how I put it in Forbes.com:
Expose The Press Players
Dan Ackman, 02.16.05, 9:12 AM ET
News accounts of the appeals court decision in the Valerie Plame affair emphasize that reporters must testify to a grand jury or face jail. But that's not quite right. The court's ruling yesterday was really that anyone and everyone must testify to the grand jury, reporters being no exception.
Yesterday's ruling by the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals upholds an earlier judgment that Matthew Cooper of Time magazine and Judith Miller of the New York Times have an obligation to testify to the grand jury about who leaked Plame's identity as a CIA agent, which could be a federal crime. Both reporters fought to stop a subpoena from a special counsel appointed by the attorney general investigating the leaks. They cited a purported journalist's privilege, which they say is necessary to protect sources who spoke to them pursuant to an agreement that their names be kept out the papers. The court said there is no such privilege either under the first amendment or federal common law.
Whether there should ever be a journalist's privilege is an interesting question. As the court pointed out in its decision yesterday, many states have enacted so-called shield laws, which protect the relationship between a confidential source and a reporter. The court also noted that the federal government has no such statute, and it declined to create the privilege on its own....
The idea that reporters should be permitted to shield the identity of confidential sources even in the face of a valid grand jury subpoena is based on the belief that an evidentiary privilege (like the one a lawyer shares with his client) will encourage sources to reveal truths to journalists. The classic example would be a witness to a scandal who tells what he knows to a journalist, who then makes the scandal known, albeit without the name of his source who leaked the information. It's hard to believe that the remote possibility of a subpoena down the road from a grand jury--which itself operates in secret--will substantially chill the source-reporter relationship.
In any event, the Plame case is nothing like the prototype that might justify a privilege. In this case, the crime, if there was a crime, was the leak itself. The sources were not witnesses to scandal; they are the scandal. Those who exposed Wilson's wife in effect used the press to do their dirty work, not to cleanse it. Their goal, at least according to Wilson, was not to reveal truth, but to punish Wilson for his revelations.
As best as we can tell, they are not brave truth tellers, but craven score-settlers, and powerful government officials to boot. Wouldn't it serve even the press' interest--along with everyone else's--to expose these scoundrels rather than continue to help them hide?
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