CBS’s Bob Schieffer (host of Face the Nation, and the interim anchor of CBS Evening News after Dan Rather leaves) has posted this commentary on the Novak-Plame debacle entitled "A Ridiculous Spectacle." What Schieffer considers "ridiculous" is the possibility that NYT reporter Judith Miller and Time reporter Matthew Cooper might to go jail for refusing to reveal the Bush administration source that conceivably violated federal law in outing Valerie Plame as a CIA operative. Schieffer seems particularly offended that Miller might go to jail even though she never wrote an article about PlameGate.
What’s "ridiculous," though, is Schieffer’s reasoning that he apparently thinks proves his point:
Outing a secret agent is a crime, but these reporters did not do it. Judy Miller didn’t even write a story about it. The leak came from someone inside the government who told columnist Bob Novak who then published it…. Unable to find out which of the government officials did this, the prosecutors are threatening to jail reporters unless they tell what they know, and that includes Judy Miller, who, I repeat, never wrote a story about it. What’s next? Arresting people who decide not to steal a car?
Good God, Bob, settle down. No one is saying that Miller or Cooper (or even Novak, for that matter, unless he lied to the grand jury) committed a crime, because the federal statute at issue applies only to people with "authorized access" to a covert agent’s identity. But let’s not lose sight of the real issue here: someone in the Bush administration probably did commit a crime by outing Plame — and Miller and Cooper probably know who that person is. The "spectacle" that Schieffer is complaining about is due to the reporters’ refusal to identify that person to the special prosecutor. And why won’t they tell? Because they say they promised their source confidentiality, and apparently the republic will collapse if they reveal their source. We’ve already discussed in detail the excellent analysis by D.C. Circuit Judge David Tatel in which he convincingly rejects the notion that reporters should always be allowed to protect their sources regardless of circumstances. So the relevant analogy is not someone who decides not to steal a car — it’s a fence who decides not to sell a stolen car but knows who stole it. The fence obviously can be compelled to testify even though he didn’t sell the car. Similarly, these reporters can be compelled to testify regardless of whether they wrote an article
