Former NY Times reporter to discuss time behind bars at June 1 press freedom event

Judith Miller spent 85 days in jail in late 2005 for refusing to reveal a source who leaked the identity of a covert CIA agent.

Miller will discuss that experience when she joins nearly a dozen other "jailbird" journalists at 6 p.m. Monday, June 1, at the National Press Club for a landmark symposium on the need for stronger legal protections for reporters.

The two-hour event in the Murrow Room is open to the public and is sponsored in part by the Club’s Journalism Institute and Freedom of the Press Committee. Tickets are $5 for Club members and $10 for the public.

At the time a prominent national security reporter for the New York Times, Miller explained her decision to go to jail in a 2005 op-ed for the paper, saying she did it to protect her source, “Scooter” Libby, former Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, because he had not given her his “personal and voluntary” permission to disclose his identity.

Miller was released from an Alexandria jail in late September 2005 after receiving Libby’s explicit permission to discuss their confidential conversations with independent counsel Patrick Fitzgerald.

Fitzgerald was prosecuting the unauthorized outing of Valerie Plame as a CIA officer as apparent retaliation for former ambassador Joe Wilson's public push back against Bush administration claims that Saddam Hussein was attempting to acquire uranium. Plame and Wilson are married.

Writing for the Times in October 2005, Miller said another key factor in her decision to fight the subpoena was that Fitzgerald had initially declined to promise to confine his questioning to just the matter of Libby, which meant she potentially would have been pressed to reveal other confidential sources unrelated to the Plame affair. Fitzgerald later agreed to limit his questioning.

“Without both agreements, I would not have testified and would still be in jail,” she wrote.

Miller’s testimony was central to Libby's 2007 conviction on perjury and obstruction of justice charges. However, Miller in her new memoir, "The Story," suggests she misread her notebooks, that her memory had played tricks with her and that Libby was probably innocent.

Miller spent 28 years at the Times, where she was part of a team of reporters that in 2002 was honored with a Pulitzer Prize for their coverage of al-Qaida. She left the paper in 2005, in part, she said, because some co-workers objected to her decision to testify in the Libby trial.

Miller had also come under considerable criticism for a series of articles she wrote in the lead-up to the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq that repeated unquestioningly now-discredited Bush administration claims about Iraq's possession of weapons of mass destruction.

Now a commentator at Fox News and a contributing editor of the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal, Miller writes about national security, foreign policy and First Amendment issues for Tablet Magazine.

The June 1 symposium is sponsored by The National Press Club Journalism Institute, The Reporters Committee for the Freedom of the Press, The First Amendment Coalition, Expose Facts.Org, The Maryland Delaware District of Columbia Press Association and the Institute for Public Accuracy.