ASSOCIATED PRESS
A Time magazine reporter still must testify before a grand jury investigating the leak of a CIA officer’s identity, a federal prosecutor said yesterday, though Time has surrendered e-mails and other documents sought in the probe.
Special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald urged a federal judge to send Time reporter Matt Cooper and New York Times reporter Judith Miller to jail if they continue to refuse to reveal their sources.
“Journalists are not entitled to promise complete confidentiality — no one in America is,” Mr. Fitzgerald wrote in court filings.
Mr. Cooper and Miss Miller reiterated last week that they would not name their sources and requested home detention rather than prison.
Mr. Fitzgerald responded that allowing the reporters home confinement would make it easier for them to continue to defy a court order to testify before the grand jury. He said special treatment for journalists may “negate the coercive effect contemplated by federal law.”
The prosecutor is investigating who in the Bush administration leaked the identity of CIA officer Valerie Plame. Mrs. Plame’s name was leaked days after her husband, former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, publicly disparaged President Bush’s case for invading Iraq.
Disclosure of an undercover intelligence officer’s identity can be a federal crime if prosecutors can show the leak was intentional and that the person who released that information knew of the officer’s secret status.
U.S. District Judge Thomas F. Hogan held the reporters in contempt in October, rejecting their argument that the First Amendment shielded them from revealing their sources. He could sentence them to jail as soon as today.
Time Inc. last week gave Mr. Fitzgerald records, notes and e-mail traffic going over the company’s system, prompting Mr. Cooper’s attorneys to argue that producing the documents made it unnecessary for him to testify.
Mr. Fitzgerald responded that Mr. Cooper failed “to meet his burden to show that there is no reasonable possibility that confinement will coerce him to testify.”
Mr. Wilson’s wife was identified as a CIA employee in a 2003 column by Robert Novak, who cited two unidentified senior Bush administration officials as sources. Mr. Novak has refused to say whether he has testified before the grand jury or been subpoenaed.
Mr. Cooper wrote a subsequent story naming Mrs. Plame, and Miss Miller gathered material but never wrote an article.
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