[Mb-civic] Time Reporter Answers Questions About Plame Leak

[Barbara Siomos]

    Time Reporter Answers Questions About Plame Leak 
    By Carol Leonnig
    Washington Post 
    Tuesday 24 August 2004
 
Cooper Reaches Deal with Justice Department to Avoid Jail

    Time magazine reporter Matthew Cooper has avoided the threat
of jail by agreeing to be interviewed yesterday by Justice Department
prosecutors investigating whether White House officials illegally leaked
the identity of a covert CIA operative to journalists.
 
    Time magazine said in a statement today that Cooper agreed
to give a deposition "because the one source the special counsel asked
about," Lewis I. "Scooter" Libby, chief of staff for Vice President
Cheney, had waived a confidentially agreement he had with Cooper. The
statement from Time spokesperson Diana Pearson said that Libby also had
agreed to allow the magazine to disclose its agreement with him. 

    "The deposition, which took place yesterday in the
Washington, D.C. office of Mr. Cooper's attorney, Floyd Abrams, focused
entirely on conversations Mr. Cooper had with Mr. Libby, one of Mr.
Cooper's sources for the articles he helped author about the leak in
July 2003," the Time statement said. "Following the deposition, the
contempt orders against both Time, Inc. and Mr. Cooper were vacated." 

    An order signed yesterday by U.S. District Chief Judge
Thomas F. Hogan and released today cleared Cooper of the civil contempt
citation that Hogan had issued for Cooper two weeks ago. 

    Hogan's Aug. 6 order threatened Cooper with an indefinite
stay in jail and his employer with thousands of dollars in daily fines
if he did not appear before a grand jury and answer questions about
conversations he had with sources about CIA operative Valerie Plame and
her husband, former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, an outspoken Bush
foreign policy critic. Yet if Cooper had appeared before a grand jury,
he and other journalists feared the questions prosecutors asked might
require him to divulge anonymous sources.
 
    Time had appealed Hogan's ruling ordering Cooper to answer
the questions in the special prosecutor investigation, but many legal
experts said the national news magazine had little hope of convincing
the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit that
journalists have a special privilege to avoid answering questions about
their newsgathering and protect their promise of anonymity to sources.
The Supreme Court held in a 1972 case, Branzberg v. Hayes, that
journalists' promises of confidentiality to sources must be set aside
when a government is investigating and prosecuting a crime. 

    Cooper's decision to answer some questions about the case
was similar to agreements special prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald
reached with NBCs Tim Russert and The Washington Post's Glenn Kessler.
In both Kessler's case and Russert's, prosecutors' questions concerned
conversations the reporters had in early July 2003 with Libby. Russert
and Kessler have said they told Fitzgerald's staff that the senior
Cheney aide did not disclose Plame's identity.
 
    Fitzgerald has shown a continuing interest in Libby.
Witnesses have said Fitzgerald has e-mails and phone records showing his
contacts with reporters and that prosecutors are interested in a story
Cooper wrote for Time last summer in which Libby was interviewed.
 
    New York Times reporter Judith Miller and Washington Post
reporter Walter Pincus also have been subpoenaed by the grand jury
investigating the leak.
 
    The investigation was sparked by a July 14, 2003, column by
syndicated columnist Robert D. Novak. The column called into question
the findings of Plame's husband, Wilson, whom the CIA had sent to the
African nation of Niger in 2002 to investigate claims that Iraq had
tried to buy uranium there for its weapons of mass destruction program.
 
    Wilson was recommended for the CIA mission by his wife, who
was a nonproliferation "operative" at the agency, Novak wrote, adding
that two administration officials offered the information as an
explanation of why Wilson was selected. By then, Wilson was publicly
accusing the Bush administration of "twisting" intelligence, including
his findings in Niger, to build a case for going to war in Iraq. 

    It can be a felony to intentionally disclose an undercover
CIA officer's identity.