Hubris

by Michael Isikoff

  After Miller had been escorted out, Cooper stood up to deliver a statement. He had woken up that morning, he said, prepared to go to jail. He had already said good-bye to his son when he had received an unexpected phone call. “A short time ago, in somewhat dramatic fashion,” Cooper told the court, “I received an express, personal release from my source. It’s with a bit of surprise and no small amount of relief that I will comply with this subpoena.”

  COOPER wouldn’t publicly identify his mystery source. The assumption of most of the reporters at the courthouse that day was that it must have been Rove. But Luskin once again muddied the picture. He told reporters that it wasn’t Rove who had called Cooper and freed him to testify. Isikoff was taken aback. Had he and Newsweek been wrong to point the finger at Rove?

  But Rove’s attorney—unknown to the reporters—was again being disingenuous. It was technically true that Rove hadn’t called Cooper. Rather, Rove’s attorney (Luskin) had called Cooper’s attorney (Sauber). The bottom line, though, was the same: Rove had been Cooper’s source, and it was Rove who, through Luskin, had given Cooper his personal waiver. Yet Rove’s lawyer was doing everything he could to keep this from becoming public.

  The day following the court hearing, Isikoff called one of the sources, who reassured him that a Time e-mail turned over to Fitzgerald showed Rove was the culprit. You see how they spin their way out of everything, Isikoff said. There’s only one way to prove it was Rove, he told his source, I need the Cooper e-mail.

  Isikoff and his source met the next day in a dark corner of an out-of-the-way restaurant at an early hour, before the lunch crowd arrived. The source slipped Isikoff a copy of the e-mail. It was more damning than Isikoff had expected.

  It was the e-mail Cooper had sent to his editors: “Subject: Rove/P&C,” for personal and confidential. The e-mail stated that Cooper had spoken to Rove “on double super secret background” and that Rove had told him that “Wilson’s wife, who apparently works at the agency on wmd issues,” had “authorized the trip.”

  In one short paragraph, the e-mail blew apart Rove and Luskin’s deceptions and the White House’s denials of the past two years. This was hard evidence that Rove had leaked and that he and the White House had covered up his role in the scandal. When Isikoff returned to the Newsweek offices, he shared the e-mail with the magazine’s senior editors. “Wow,” said Tom Watson, Newsweek’s national editor, “I don’t know that I’ve ever seen a smoking gun before.”

  Still, the editors wanted to know who had provided it. Isikoff explained that the source was insistent: the reporter wasn’t to disclose the source’s identity to anyone, not even his editors. There was some back-and-forth over this at the magazine. But Isikoff’s editors were eventually satisfied the e-mail was real. Once Isikoff had it in hand, he was able to get other sources to confirm its authenticity. When he called Luskin for comment and started reading the e-mail to him, the lawyer asked him to slow down so he could start typing. It was clear Luskin had no idea what it said or how much his client was implicated by Cooper’s own words. Still, the lawyer was unruffled. This is consistent with what Karl has been saying all along, he said without missing a beat.

  THAT Sunday, the Newsweek story hit the Web and caused a stir. It was undeniable proof that Rove had passed classified information about Valerie Wilson to a reporter. True, Rove hadn’t sought out Cooper to slip him the secret, in classic Washington leak fashion. He had blurted it out in a brief telephone conversation in response to the reporter’s question. But at stake was the credibility of everything the White House had been saying since the controversy began.

  On Monday, July 11, when Scott McClellan, the White House press secretary, took to the podium, the press corps ripped into him. It was as if the reporters were venting pent-up frustrations that had been gathering for years. AP’s Terry Hunt initiated the barrage: “Does the president stand by his pledge to fire anyone involved in the leak?”*86 McClellan responded that “while that investigation is ongoing, the White House is not going to comment on it.” An angry David Gregory of NBC News grilled the press secretary. “This is ridiculous!” Gregory exclaimed, adding, “Do you stand by your remarks from that podium or not?” And so it went. McClellan turned every question away with the same line. When did Bush learn that Rove had leaked the information? Would the president take any action now that it was clear Rove had been one of the leakers? Did Bush still have confidence in Rove? “I’m simply not going to comment on an ongoing investigation,” McClellan said.

  Luskin had his own spin for reporters. He told them that when Rove had talked to Cooper about Wilson’s wife, he hadn’t identified her by name. He had only referred to “Wilson’s wife.” Yet days later, Rove was also tied to the original leak: the Novak column. On July 15, The New York Times, citing a source “who had been officially briefed on the matter,” reported that Rove had been Novak’s second source on the CIA leak story.

  Rove was now fingered as a source for the two reporters who had written articles disclosing Valerie Wilson’s CIA connection. Democrats jumped on the disclosures. Aides to Senator Harry Reid, the Democratic leader in the Senate, spent a day preparing a sixteen-page background memo on the leak, asking “When did President Bush learn any details of this incident?” Representative Henry Waxman circulated a memo maintaining that Rove had violated the agreement on handling classified information signed by senior government officials. He noted that under existing rules, Rove, whether or not he had committed a crime, could lose his security clearance or face dismissal for this violation.

  On July 17, 2005, Time published an article by Matt Cooper describing his appearance before Fitzgerald’s grand jury five days earlier. Cooper had previously not publicly identified his primary source. But with his e-mail about Rove now public, there was no reason to hold back. In this piece, he reported he had told the grand jurors about his conversation with Rove. Cooper also revealed for the first time that he had previously told the grand jury that Scooter Libby (who had granted Cooper a personal waiver) had been another source for him regarding Wilson’s wife and the Niger trip. Now two top White House officials were publicly identified as leakers. The next day, Bush was asked if he would stick to the White House position that anyone involved in the leak would be fired. He said, “If someone committed a crime, they will no longer work in my administration.” With Rove and Libby exposed, the president was raising the bar.

  JUDY MILLER was still in jail two months later when she received a letter from Scooter Libby.

  She wasn’t in a country club facility. The Alexandria jail was also home to Zacarias Moussaoui, the convicted terrorist. She was living in an 80-square-foot-cell, sleeping on a mat on a concrete slab, and brushing her hair with a toothbrush. She wore a dark green uniform. Her lawyer repeatedly told reporters that she was being treated like any other prisoner. There was one exception: she had been receiving a parade of high-profile visitors. The notables included Sulzberger, Keller, Tom Brokaw, Wall Street Journal Managing Editor Paul Steiger, former senator Robert Dole, UN ambassador John Bolton, former White House terrorism czar Richard Clarke, weapons inspector Charles Duelfer, and Senators Chris Dodd and Arlen Specter. “She looked radiant and seemed aglow with purpose,” said one friend who visited her in prison early on in her ordeal. Miller, this visitor recalled, was “full of urgent talk about the need to pass a shield law [to protect reporters] on the Hill.” Miller reported that she was angling for a job in the laundry and had already made connections with the right people. “She was counting the number of letters she got each day—they were in the many dozens—but she was concerned because they were dropping off,” this friend said. Miller was also upset that there wasn’t more press coverage of her case. Each day, she would check the outdated copies of The New York Times she could get in prison and was disappointed there weren’t news articles about her situation.

  While maintaining a brave face to her jailhouse visitors, Miller was worried. Judge Hogan’s contempt citation would
keep her locked up until Fitzgerald’s grand jury expired at the end of October. But Bennett, her lawyer, had called Fitzgerald in August and was convinced that the prosecutor intended to convene a new grand jury and keep Miller in jail for another eighteen months if she didn’t talk. There was also the lingering possibility of what Bennett had warned her about nearly a year earlier—that Fitzgerald could seek criminal charges against her that could lead to additional prison time. Miller wanted a way out.

  She and Bennett had been discussing approaching Libby and asking him for a specific personal waiver, like the waiver Rove had granted Cooper. Sulzberger was cool to the idea. As Miller later told others, Sulzberger, her old friend, favored an absolutist position: we don’t cooperate with law enforcement, we don’t testify in court. Abrams, too, was wary of her taking a step that could be portrayed as a retreat. Miller was annoyed. Sulzberger was asking her to stay in jail to prove a point. Why not, she asked, reach out to Libby and see what happens? Why stay in jail to protect a source who was willing to release her from her promise? She wasn’t prepared to remain behind bars for another eighteen months to five years if she didn’t have to.

  Sulzberger, Miller later told colleagues, tried to talk her out of approaching Libby. But Bennett went ahead. He contacted Libby’s attorney. Fitzgerald stepped up the pressure on his own. On September 12, he wrote a pointed letter to Libby’s lawyer, Joseph Tate, reminding him that his client had signed a written waiver releasing reporters from any pledge of confidentiality. If Libby was unwilling to affirm that directly to Miller, Fitzgerald noted, one reason might be that “Mr. Libby had decided that encouraging Ms. Miller to testify to the grand jury was not in his best interest.”

  It was a clever move on Fitzgerald’s part. Libby was boxed in. Either he granted Miller the personal waiver she wanted, or he would be all but acknowledging to the prosecutor that he had something to hide. And so, three days later, Libby wrote Miller the get-out-of-jail card she was seeking—but a rather odd one with some intriguing literary flourishes.

  “Dear Judy,” Libby began the note. “Your reporting, and you, are missed. Like many Americans, I admire your principled stand. But, like many of your friends and readers, I would welcome you back among the rest of us, doing what you do best—reporting.” Libby said that he would give her a “waiver of confidentiality.” He noted that “every other reporter’s testimony makes clear that they did not discuss Ms. Plame’s name or identity with me.” Then the onetime novelist wrote:

  You went to jail in the summer. It is fall now. You will have stories to cover—Iraqi elections and suicide bombers, biological threats and the Iranian nuclear program. Out West, where you vacation, the aspens will be already turning. They turn in clusters, because their roots connect them. Come back to work—and life.

  Aspens connected by roots? Was he suggesting that he and Miller were somehow tied together below the surface? Was Libby attempting to shape what Miller would say to the grand jury?

  A coded message or not, the letter was what Miller wanted. But she still insisted on hearing directly from Libby. On September 19, the lawyers—Bennett and Tate—arranged a conference call with Libby and Miller from her jailhouse phone. It was an awkward conversation. “I’m sorry you’re in jail, Judy,” Libby said. “I am, too,” she replied. “The food is not very good.” Libby then told Miller he wanted to “encourage” her to testify to “help both of us…get this matter behind us,” according to an account later provided by Tate. Libby said that he “hadn’t fully understood” that she had gone to jail just because of him and that he had thought there might be others she was protecting, according to Miller’s account. She asked him, “ ‘Do you really want me to testify? Are you sure you really want me to testify?” Libby replied, according to her, “Absolutely. Believe it. I mean it.”

  The phone call provided Miller with the “personal waiver” she thought was necessary to vindicate her position. She agreed to testify. On September 29—after serving eighty-five days—she was released. Sulzberger proclaimed victory. “Judy has been unwavering in her commitment to protect the confidentiality of her source,” he said. Sulzberger and Keller greeted her warmly and whisked her away to the Ritz-Carlton hotel for a massage, a manicure, a martini, and a steak dinner.

  The next day, September 30, Miller testified before the grand jury for three hours. But her account was muddled. She described her July 8 breakfast meeting with Libby at the St. Regis Hotel, when—after insisting on being described as a “former Hill staffer”—Libby had attacked Joe Wilson and told her (wrongly) that Wilson’s wife worked at WINPAC, the CIA center that specialized in analyzing weapons of mass destruction. But Miller had “no clear memory of the context” of the conversation about Wilson’s wife, she later wrote. Nor could she explain the “Valerie Flame” entry in the same notebook. She thought she might have gotten that from another source—but she had no idea who that might be. She also couldn’t explain why she had written “Victoria Wilson” in a notebook containing notes from her July 12 phone interview with Libby.

  Miller returned to The New York Times building on October 3, 2005. But she didn’t receive the heroine’s welcome she might once have anticipated. She was by now a problematic figure. She had ended up accepting an arrangement similar to those reached by the other reporters pursued by Fitzgerald.*87 (Lucy Dalglish of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press noted that the outcome of the Miller case could embolden other prosecutors to imprison reporters, for it had worked in this instance.) Her prewar reporting was seen as an embarrassment by most of her colleagues. And her First Amendment fight had been tainted by the recent revelation that it had been Cheney’s chief of staff—an arch proponent of the discredited intelligence she had championed—whom she had gone to jail to protect. Miller was worried about the reaction she would get from her colleagues.

  After she entered the newsroom, she gave a brief speech about how her case had been a victory for press freedom and the First Amendment. But the response was “quite frosty,” one reporter recalled. The applause was tepid. A team of New York Times correspondents had been assigned by Keller to write an exhaustive reconstruction of the entire case. One was veteran investigative reporter Don Van Natta, Jr. “A lot of people in the newsroom came up to me afterward and said they hoped I could explain to them what the great victory for the First Amendment was,” Van Natta later recalled.

  A short time later, Miller discovered in her desk a notebook of her June 23, 2003, meeting with Libby at the Old Executive Office Building—an interview she said she had completely forgotten to tell Fitzgerald about. The discovery prompted a frantic call to her lawyer and a trip back to Washington for more testimony before Fitzgerald. The notebook contained entries from the discussion she had had with Libby about Joe Wilson that day, including the words “wife works at bureau?” She told Fitzgerald she didn’t know why the entry said “bureau.” She thought it meant a “bureau” at the CIA. This was the third reference in her notebooks to Valerie Wilson that she said she couldn’t explain.

  After all the drama of a historic First Amendment battle, the results were meager. For the prosecutor who had relentlessly pursued her, Miller turned out to be anything but the ideal witness. Her memory was clouded, and her notes were confusing—and this jumble was mostly beneficial for Scooter Libby. Still, her testimony confirmed the bare minimum: that Libby, contrary to what he had told the grand jury, had talked to Judy Miller about Joe Wilson’s wife and her employment at the CIA.

  ON OCTOBER 16, the Times published its lengthy reconstruction—authored by Van Natta and three other reporters—along with a sidebar by Miller recounting her testimony before the grand jury. The article was the equivalent of picking at an open scab. The “Miller case” was no tale of a heroic battle for reporters’ rights. It was a mess of conflicting interests, unresolved disputes, and journalistic missteps. The article noted that when Managing Editor Jill Abramson was asked what she regretted about the paper’s handling of the episodes, s
he remarked, “The entire thing.” And Miller, in this piece, offered a simplistic, self-excusing explanation for her flawed prewar reporting: “WMD—I got it totally wrong…. If your sources are wrong, you are wrong. I did the best job that I could.”*88

  Several days later, on October 21, Keller sent a memo to the staff saying he wished that “we had dealt with the controversy over our coverage of WMD as soon as I became executive editor.” But, he explained, the paper at that time had still been reeling from the Jayson Blair fiasco. “By waiting a year to own up to our mistakes,” he continued, “we allowed the anger inside and outside the paper to fester. Worse, we fear, we fostered an impression that The Times put a higher premium on protecting its reporters than on coming clean with its readers.” Keller noted that Miller “seems to have misled” an editor “about the extent of her involvement” in the leak case. He added, “if I had known the details of Judy’s entanglement with Libby, I’d have been more careful in how the paper articulated its defense, and perhaps more willing than I had been to support efforts aimed at exploring compromises.”

  The next day, Times columnist Maureen Dowd published a piece, headlined “Woman of Mass Destruction,” excoriating Miller for her “leading role in the dangerous echo chamber” that had led to war.