A Split Between The Times & Miller?

New York Times executives "fully encouraged" reporter Judith Miller in her refusal to testify in the CIA leak investigation, a stance that led to her jailing, and later told Miller she could not continue at the paper unless she wrote a first-person account, her attorney said yesterday.

The comments by Robert Bennett came as Executive Editor Bill Keller accused Miller of apparently misleading the newspaper about her dealings with Vice President Cheney's top aide, signaling the first public split between Miller and the management of a newspaper that had fully embraced her in the contentious legal battle.

Bennett, Miller's lawyer, said he argued with Times executives that her agreement with special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald to testify before a grand jury did not entitle her to put "in the newspaper" her off-the-record conversations with Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Cheney's chief of staff.

Disputing a lengthy Times story last Sunday in which Publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. said that "this car had her hand on the wheel," Bennett said Sulzberger and Keller "were making it very clear what they thought she should do. . . . She may be controversial in some things, but the bottom line is she spent 85 days in jail, mostly on a principle which the New York Times fully encouraged her to assert." He added that the executives left the final decision to Miller.

Don't be silly. Laws are for the little people, not MSM reporters!

Clearly - I have seen many stories on this website that expound on how the MSM believes it should be able to release CLASSIFIED DATA to the general populace if it helps to "get the truth out about the illegal war in Iraq and Afghanistan". The MSM believes they have a "special place" in American truth telling, no matter who it hurts (or gets killed). It would be funny if it wasn't so serious a breach of national security!!

"Until Fitzgerald came after her," Keller wrote, "I didn't know that Judy had been one of the reporters on the receiving end of the . . . whisper campaign" against Joe Wilson, the husband of CIA operative Valerie Plame. "I should have wondered why I was learning this from the special counsel, a year after the fact." Citing a 2003 conversation with Miller that was recalled by Washington bureau chief Philip Taubman, Keller wrote: "Judy seems to have misled Phil Taubman about the extent of her involvement."

Keller was traveling yesterday and could not be reached. Managing Editor Jill Abramson and George Freeman, a Times Co. lawyer involved in the case, did not respond to phone messages, and a Times spokeswoman declined comment.

snip

Bennett said he forcefully argued against Miller's accompanying first-person piece about her dealings with Libby because "it could affect the criminal prosecution" of senior administration officials who may have outed Plame as working for the CIA as part of a campaign against her husband, a White House critic. Such an article also "would antagonize the prosecutor, Mr. Fitzgerald," Bennett said.

"At one point Judy agreed to do what I recommended. But she was under tremendous pressure by the New York Times to write the story" as a condition of her employment.

snip

Bennett said he insisted that Miller not provide her notes to the Times reporters conducting the inquiry

snip

"They were documents which had been subpoenaed by the grand jury, and I didn't think it was appropriate to share them," he said. "But even if it wasn't illegal, there was a pending criminal investigation."

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