Lies, lies and more lies: So Scooter Libby was lying when he said he had no idea Judith Miller had languished in jail for 85 days waiting for him to release her from their confidentiality agreement. In fact, the prosecutor prodded Libby issue a new waiver – the one she used to get out of jail:
The prosecutor’s encouragement, in a letter obtained by Reuters, has prompted some lawyers in the case to question whether Cheney’s aide was acting completely voluntarily when he gave Miller the confidentiality waiver she had insisted on…
Miller maintains she only agreed to testify — after spending 85 days in jail — because she received what she describes as a personal and voluntary waiver of confidentiality from her source. She dismissed an earlier waiver by Cheney’s chief of staff, Lewis Libby, as coerced.
But Libby offered a new waiver that Miller accepted after he received a September 12 letter in which the prosecutor, investigating a possible White House role in the leak, repeatedly encouraged him to do just that.
“I would welcome such a communication reaffirming Mr. Libby’s waiver,” prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald told Libby’s lawyer, Joseph Tate. “It would be viewed as cooperation with the investigation,” Fitzgerald said.
Some lawyers in the case called the letter a thinly veiled threat seeking Libby’s cooperation, and said it raised questions about whether Libby’s waiver was as voluntary as Miller and her lawyers had described.
