Plame Case May End With Criminal Going Free and 'Witnesses' Jailed [View All]

[Robbien]

By William E. Jackson Jr.

(March 23, 2005) -- A Washington week of interviews with numerous reporters and editors for national news outlets leaves one with a checkered perspective in the case of Valerie Plame and the two witnesses/defendants -- Matthew Cooper of Time magazine, who wrote about Plame, and Judith Miller of The New York Times, who did not -- still under sentence for contempt of court.

On March 21, more than a month after a three-judge panel of the circuit court for the District of Columbia upheld their October contempt convictions, joint counsel Floyd Abrams filed an appeal requesting a re-hearing. In talking to E&P this week, he did not sound very optimistic as to their chances: ""It's not as if the court routinely grants such a request -- but we are taking every step available to us."

If the appeal is heard, there is a widespread assumption among close observers that it will result in a unanimous opinion upholding the lower court. (And virtually no lawyer involved thinks the Supreme Court would later consider the case on appeal.) But no one knows how long it will take for the eight judges to decide. In the meantime, should the grand jury expire, special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald can renew it.

Paradoxically, there is now little expectation that Fitzgerald will succeed in identifying the person or persons in the Executive Office of the President who was first to knowingly and intentionally violate the Intelligence Identities Protection Act by revealing Valerie Plame's covert CIA identity to journalists. It appears that every official is in a position to claim that her name was "out there," in circulation, before Bob Novak's July column, and that they merely repeated what had been heard from someone else to members of the press or the administration.

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