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Bob Woodward 'fesses up to a grand juryabout Valerie Plame... (click here to see it reeeeeeeally large)

WASHINGTON - A federal judge found Washington Post reporter Walter Pincus in contempt Wednesday, saying the journalist must reveal his government sources for stories about the criminal investigation of nuclear scientist Wen Ho Lee. U.S. District Judge Rosemary Collyer said that "in order to avoid a repetition of the Judith Miller imbroglio," Pincus must contact his sources to inform them of the court's order in case they wish to release him from his pledge of confidentiality. Miller, a former New York Times reporter, served 85 days in jail for contempt in the CIA leak investigation, agreeing to talk only after...

Pincus: Woodward 'Asked Me to Keep Him Out' of Plame Reporting By Joe Strupp Published: November 16, 2005 12:45 PM ET NEW YORK Walter Pincus, the longtime Washington Post reporter and one of several journalists who testified in the Valerie Plame case, said he believed as far back as 2003 that Bob Woodward had some involvement in the case but he did not pursue the information because Woodward asked him not to. "He asked me to keep him out of the reporting and I agreed to do that," Pincus said today. His comments followed a Post story today about Woodward's...

Washington Post Assistant Managing Editor Bob Woodward testified under oath Monday in the CIA leak case that a senior administration official told him about CIA operative Valerie Plame and her position at the agency nearly a month before her identity was disclosed.

ON JUNE12, 2003, when he first published a story about the matter, Washington Post reporter Walter Pincus became the second journalist to have been used by Ambassador Joseph Wilson to peddle bogus information about his February 2002 trip to Niger. Wilson told Pincus that he had debunked Bush administration claims that Iraq had sought uranium from Niger. He was specific and apparently seemed credible. And Pincus bought it all. He wrote: Armed with information purportedly showing that Iraqi officials had been seeking to buy uranium in Niger one or two years earlier, the CIA in early February 2002 dispatched a...

THE STATE DEPARTMENT PLOT THICKENS [John Podhoretz] Time Magazine has a new story about the revelation of Valerie Plame's name -- a story that, despite Time's own bizarre spin, reinforces the claim that Karl Rove and others learned that Joseph Wilson was married to a CIA operative from the media. "As the investigation tightens into the leak of the identity of covert CIA operative Valerie Plame, sources tell TIME some White House officials may have learned she was married to former ambassador Joseph Wilson weeks before his July 6, 2003, Op-Ed piece criticizing the Administration," writes Massimo Calabresi. Later, he...

Posted Sunday, Jul. 31, 2005 As the investigation tightens into the leak of the identity of covert CIA operative Valerie Plame, sources tell TIME some White House officials may have learned she was married to former ambassador Joseph Wilson weeks before his July 6, 2003, Op-Ed piece criticizing the Administration. That prospect increases the chances that White House official Karl Rove and others learned about Plame from within the Administration rather than from media contacts. Rove has told investigators he believes he learned of her directly or indirectly from reporters, according to his lawyer. The previously undisclosed fact gathering began...

The special prosecutor in the CIA leak probe has interviewed a wider range of administration officials than was previously known, part of an effort to determine whether anyone broke laws during a White House effort two years ago to discredit allegations that President Bush used faulty intelligence to justify the Iraq war, according to several officials familiar with the case. Prosecutors have questioned former CIA director George J. Tenet and deputy director John E. McLaughlin, former CIA spokesman Bill Harlow, State Department officials, and even a stranger who approached columnist Robert D. Novak on the street.

A classified State Department memorandum central to a federal leak investigation contained information about CIA officer Valerie Plame in a paragraph marked "(S)" for secret, a clear indication that any Bush administration official who read it should have been aware the information was classified, according to current and former government officials.

In a major setback for proponents of the legal rights of journalists, the U.S. Supreme Court yesterday declined to hear the case of two reporters who have refused to cooperate with a grand-jury investigation.... Time magazine reporter Matthew Cooper and New York Times correspondent Judith Miller now face as much as 18 months in prison for civil contempt unless they comply with a lower-court order that they cooperate with a government investigation into the leak.... The Supreme Court's decision not to address the case has far-reaching implications for the rights of journalists in protecting unnamed sources from federal investigations. Reporters...

The Washington Post yesterday said a quotation used in its lead Page One headline in Thursday's paper -- that the United States got it "almost all wrong" about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq -- was not new and was incorrectly attributed to the chief U.S. weapons inspector in Iraq. In an article on Thursday, The Post identified Charles A. Duelfer, whom the Bush administration picked to complete a U.S. investigation of Iraq's weapons programs, as the source of that remark. The dispatch by Dana Priest and Walter Pincus reported that Mr. Duelfer, chairman of the CIA's Iraq Survey Group,...

In an Oct. 10 editorial titled "The Promise of the First Amendment," the publisher and chief executive of the New York Times opined that for a federal judge to imprison their reporter Judith Miller for contempt of court violates the press freedoms guaranteed in the First Amendment. This argument misstates existing law and misunderstands the issues at stake.... The Times argues that "the press cannot perform its intended role if its sources of information -- particularly information about the government -- are cut off." Hence, Ms. Miller has a First Amendment right to refuse to respond to the subpoena. This...

A prosecutor's investigation into an apparent attempt by the Bush administration to punish a political opponent by revealing classified information has veered terribly off course. It threatens grievous harm to freedom of the press and the vital protection it provides against government misconduct. The reality of the threat was driven home, quite personally for us, last week, when a federal judge in Washington sentenced a Times reporter, Judith Miller, to up to 18 months in prison for refusing to testify before a grand jury. The panel is looking into who gave Robert Novak the name of a covert Central Intelligence...

WASHINGTON, Oct. 15 - President Bush's chief political adviser, Karl Rove, testified on Friday to a federal grand jury investigating whether it was anyone at the White House who had illegally disclosed the name of a C.I.A. undercover officer to a newspaper columnist, a lawyer for Mr. Rove said. "He answered fully and truthfully every one of their questions," the lawyer, Robert Luskin, said. Mr. Luskin added that Mr. Rove, who testified for more than two hours, did not seek to avoid answering any question on legal grounds. A spokesman for the White House, Scott McClellan, said the testimony demonstrated...

"How the White House Used Disputed Arms Intelligence" NYT 10/3/04

Walter Pincus, a 71-year-old Washington Post reporter who has earned the respect and envy of his colleagues for the government contacts he has cultivated in more than 30 years at the paper, walked into a conference room at a Washington law firm two weeks ago and read a statement. "As someone who covers national security and intelligence, I depend on confidential sources more than most reporters," he told Patrick J. Fitzgerald, the special prosecutor appointed to investigate the disclosure to journalists of the identity of a covert C.I.A. agent, Valerie Plame. "My sources take a chance when they trust me...

Some prosecutors don't subpoena journalists at all because of the injury it may do to the First Amendment. In 1998, for example, former Attorney General Dick Thornburgh and Iran-contra independent counsel Lawrence Walsh told the American Journalism Review that they couldn't recall ever having subpoenaed a reporter. Thornburgh cited a very practical consideration for not subpoenaing reporters: "You don't want to get the media mad at you."

A federal district judge in Washington has ordered a reporter for The New York Times to testify before a grand jury investigating the disclosure of the identity of a covert C.I.A. officer. In a decision dated Sept. 9 and released yesterday, the judge, Thomas F. Hogan, said the reporter, Judith Miller, must describe any conversations she had with "a specified executive branch official." The judge said Ms. Miller had received subpoenas issued by a special prosecutor investigating "the potentially illegal disclosure of the identity of C.I.A. official Valerie Plame." George Freeman, assistant general counsel of The New York Times Company,...

"A Washington Post reporter's confidential source has revealed his or her identity to the special prosecutor conducting the CIA leak inquiry, a development that provides investigators with a fact they have been pursuing in the nearly year-long probe." WPost reporter Walter Pincus "instead gave a deposition yesterday in which he recounted his conversation with the source, whom he has previously identified as an "administration official." Pincus said "I understand that my source has already spoken to the special prosecutor about our conversation on July 12 [2003], and that the special prosecutor has dropped his demand that I reveal my source."...

(snip)....U.S. District Chief Judge Thomas F. Hogan... unsealed an order that demands the "confinement" of Time reporter Matthew Cooper, who has refused to testify in the probe... ... Hogan also issued an Aug. 6 order confining Cooper "at a suitable place until such time as he is willing to comply with the grand jury subpoena," and ordered Time to be fined $1,000 a day. ... ... While NBC fought a subpoena issued May 21 and was included in the opinion, it avoided a contempt citation after Tim Russert, moderator of NBC's "Meet the Press," agreed to an interview over the...