New York Times reporter Judith Miller released from jail BY JOHN SHIFFMAN AND STEVE GOLDSTEIN
Knight Ridder Newspapers
WASHINGTON - (KRT) - Judith Miller, The New York Times reporter who has been jailed since July 6 for refusing to identify a source, has been released, The Philadelphia Inquirer has learned.
Miller left an Alexandria, Va. jail at 3:55 p.m., a jail official said.
She was released after she had a telephone conversation with the Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, I. Lewis Libby, sources said. In that conversation, Libby reaffirmed that he had released Miller from a promise of confidentiality more than a year ago, sources said.
The special prosecutor in the case, Patrick Fitzgerald, has sought to compel Miller to reveal her source to a grand jury investigating whether Bush administration officials leaked the name of a CIA covert officer, Valerie Plame.
A 1982 federal law makes it a crime to disclose the name of American covert agents.
Plame's husband, former ambassador Joseph Wilson, has said he believes his wife's name was leaked as part of an effort to discredit his criticsm of the Administration's build up to the war in Iraq.
Columnist Robert Novak's July 2003 column sparked the controversy by naming Plame as a CIA operative who worked on weapons-of-mass-destruction issues.
Prosecutors have interviewed President Bush and Cheney and the federal grand jury has taken testimony from senior Bush aides, including advisors Karl Rove and Libby.
In July, a federal judge ordered Miller jailed for refusing to testify about her sources before the grand jury. Miller never wrote an article about Plame.
It could not be immediately determined whether Miller has now agreed to testify.
The judge also threatened to jail Time Magazine reporter Matt Cooper, but Cooper was spared incarceration after agreeing to testify at the last minute, saying Rove had given him a personal release to identify him as a source.
"I have no comment. I have no guidance," said Randall Samborn, a spokesman for Fitzgerald.
Libby's lawyer, Joseph A. Tate of Philadelphia, declined to comment.
Since July, Miller had been held in suburban Virginia at the Alexandria Detention Center. According to The Washington Post, her visitors included former NBC anchor Tom Brokaw, U.N. ambassador John R. Bolton and former senator Robert J. Dole, R-Kan.