Libby didn't "get a push" from anyone. The "reporter" is an idiot. He hasn't written anything but negative pieces about President Bush and/or his administration that I can remember.
Concur. Libby gave Miller (and everyone) authorization to speak over a year ago. What Miller needed was Fitzgerald to promise he was not going to ask her about her tip-off to the Hamas- and al-Qaeda-connected Holy Land Foundation that they were about to be raided by the FBI.
Miller's got to be pretty career-desperate by now. She's on the outs with everybody at the times. Raines, her protector, is gone, and Pinch, her other protector, had to make a choice of Judy or the paper. Given that the paper is the only thing that distinguishes Raines from the guy covering town meetings in Caribou, Maine, Judy comes in second no matter how frequently or recently she bumped uglies with him.
Furthermore, Miller's success, such as it has been, has depended on (1) sleeping with guys who have information and (2) sleeping with senior editors, etc. so that she can attach her byline to the work of her juniors. The problem with being a whore, which is the essence of Miller's career, is that it is a trade which values youth over experience. In Judy's case, her youth is long spent, and her experience is not of interest to Bill Keller (unlike, evidently, Raines).
So Miller is done at the Times. All over. And she needs to find another job. But it has to be a paper that (1) obsesses about Washington inside information, and (2) has a Times-style "Star System" of the sort that enables Miller, Jayson Blair, Charlie LeDuff (a plagiarist like Blair, kept on because?) and others to dispense with the norms of normal behaviour (let alone journalistic standards).
And she needs to find some new sources: men with information that will give it up to a sixtysomething, very unpleasant woman whose only positive is that she, too, "gives it up."
d.o.l.
Criminal Number 18F