WASHINGTON -- The evidence prosecutors have assembled in the CIA leak case suggests Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff sought out reporters in the weeks before an undercover operative's identity was compromised in the news media, casting doubt on one of the White House's main lines of defense.\nFor months, the White House and its supporters have argued top presidential aides did not knowingly expose Valerie Plame, the wife of administration critic Joseph Wilson, as a CIA operative.\nAt most, the aides passed on information about her that entered the White House from reporters, the supporters argued.\nSpecial Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald now knows that Cheney aide I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby met three times with a New York Times reporter before the leak of Plame's identity, initiated a call to NBC's Tim Russert and was a confirming source about Wilson's wife for a Time magazine reporter.\nAnd in a new twist, presidential political adviser Karl Rove has testified that it's possible Libby was his source before Rove talked to two reporters about the CIA operative.\nIn light of all the disclosures, "it's going to be as difficult for the defense to prove the theory that the White House got the information from reporters as it is for Fitzgerald to prove that the White House leaked the information about Wilson's wife," said Washington-based white-collar defense attorney James D. Wareham.\nWhere Libby first heard the information still isn't publicly known, but a full three weeks before Plame's name first showed up in print, Libby was telling New York Times reporter Judith Miller that he thought Wilson's wife worked for the CIA, according to Miller's testimony.\nWhile Libby maintains he didn't know Plame's name until it was published in the news media, the now-public evidence suggests Libby at least was aware that Wilson's wife worked at the CIA and that he spread the information.\nProsecutors must determine whether it was part of an effort to undermine the credibility of Plame's husband who was criticizing the White House.\nUntil this week, "the news media did it" was a standard defense among Republicans trying to protect the Bush administration from the political fallout of Fitzgerald's criminal investigation. Loyalists said that even if White House aides had passed on information, they didn't get it from classified sources and were simply repeating what they heard from journalists.\nAs new evidence accumulates on the public record, Libby's original source of information and how he passed the information on are becoming crucial unanswered questions. The public still doesn't know much about what the vice president and his top aide talked about, either.\nIn grand jury testimony shown to Rove, Libby said he had told Rove about information he had gotten about Wilson's wife from Russert, according to a person directly familiar with the information.\nProsecutors, however, have a different account from Russert. The TV network has said Russert told authorities he did not know about Wilson's wife's identity until it was published and therefore could not have told Libby about it. Russert also says it was Libby who initiated the contact with him.\nIn Miller's case, the reporter was interviewing Libby June 23, 2003, for a story on the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq when the vice president's chief of staff suggested a CIA tie for Wilson's wife, Miller has said.\n"This was the first time I had been told that Mr. Wilson's wife might work for the CIA," Miller wrote in a first-person account over the weekend. Miller said this week that she never wrote a story about Wilson's wife because "it wasn't that important to me. I was focused on the main question: Was our WMD intelligence slanted?"
SUB: Miller addresses comment on security clearance
NEW YORK -- New York Times reporter Judith Miller has addressed an issue that raised eyebrows in the journalism community: her statement that she had "clearance to see secret information" while covering the invasion of Iraq.\nIn a first-person piece last weekend, Miller wrote that because of that status, "I was not permitted to discuss with editors some of the more sensitive information about Iraq."\nThe statement led some to charge that the Times had allowed Miller to become compromised by the military.\nBut Miller told the paper for a story published Thursday that her "clearance" was akin to the routine nondisclosure form for all reporters "embedded" with military units, which she signed when she was deployed with the 75th Exploitation Task Force. The unit's job was to find weapons of mass destruction.\nMiller said she also agreed to additional ground rules permitting her to discuss some secret information only with two of the paper's top editors.\nOne of her attorneys, Floyd Abrams, told The Associated Press that while Miller's security status didn't rise to the level of having official clearance, it was still unusual.\n"Although the form she signed was similar to that signed by other journalists, her selection to be exposed to highly classified information was approved at a significantly higher level than is generally done, and this was because she was routinely exposed to secret information," he said.\nThe Defense Department has declined to comment on Miller's security status. A New York Times spokeswoman did not respond to requests for comment, and Miller did not return a message left by the AP on her cell phone.\nFormer CBS national security correspondent Bill Lynch wrote in a letter to an online journalism forum that giving a reporter security clearance would come "as close as one can get to government licensing of journalists."\n"The New York Times (if it knew) should never have allowed her to become so compromised," he wrote.\nTimes reporter Adam Liptak said in a speech to the New York City Bar Association this week that if Miller had indeed received official security clearance, "that's an impossible position for her to be in."\n"We should not be making deals with the government that don't allow us to publish what we know," he said.
