Lips Zipped, Reporter In Jail
NY Times Reporter Defies Judge's Order To Reveal Her Source
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Play CBS Video Video Reporters In Legal Hot Water Two reporters' lengthy legal battle to protect their sources reached a climax as they appeared before a judge who had found them in contempt. One was ordered jailed. Jim Stewart reports.
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Video NY Times: Chilling Conclusion CBS News RAW: N.Y. Times Executive Editor Bill Keller told the press the incarceration of a reporter is a chilling conclusion to a case that sets a precedent about a journalist's rights.
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Video Cooper: This Is A Sad Day CBS News RAW: Matthew Cooper has agreed to testify in front of a grand jury regarding information he received about agent Valerie Plame. He had resisted legal attempts to reveal his sources.
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A reporter (right) takes notes at a demonstration outside the federal courthouse in Minneapolis as First Amendment supporters rally on behalf of journalists Judith Miller and Matthew Cooper. (AP)
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Judith Miller, with defense attorney, Bob Bennett (left), outside the courthouse where she was ordered to immediately report to a federal prison in Arlington, Va. She could be there for months. (AP)
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Time Magazine journalist Matthew Cooper, telling reporters that will testify about his source - now that his source has given him permission to do so. (AP)
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Interactive The Leak: Key Players People, events and connections in the leak of a CIA operative's name.
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Interactive History Of Press Freedom Follow the evolving struggles over press freedom in the United States.
"This is not the first time a journalist has gone to prison to protect a source and it won't be the last time," reports Cohen. "It happens because the courts and Congress have not recognized that the First Amendment's free press rights protect journalists from having to reveal their sources during a criminal investigation."
Fitzgerald is investigating who in the administration leaked Plame's identity. Her name was disclosed in a column by Robert Novak days after her husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, impugned part of President Bush's justification for invading Iraq.
Wilson was sent to Africa by the Bush administration to investigate an intelligence claim that Saddam Hussein may have purchased yellowcake uranium from Niger in the late 1990s for use in nuclear weapons. Wilson said he could not verify the claim and criticized the administration for manipulating the intelligence to "exaggerate the Iraqi threat."
Novak, whose column cited as sources two unidentified senior Bush administration officials, has refused to say whether he has testified before the grand jury or been subpoenaed. Novak has said he "will reveal all" after the matter is resolved and that it is wrong for the government to jail journalists.
Disclosure of an undercover intelligence officer's identity can be a federal crime if prosecutors can show the leak was intentional and the person who released that information knew of the officer's secret status.
Cooper spoke to White House deputy chief of staff Karl Rove after Wilson's public criticism of Bush and before Novak's column ran, according to Rove's lawyer, Robert Luskin, who denies that Rove leaked Plame's identity to anyone. Cooper's story mentioning Plame's name appeared after Novak's column. Miller did some reporting, but never wrote a story.
Among the witnesses Fitzgerald's investigators have questioned besides Bush and Cheney are Cheney's chief of staff, Lewis Libby; and former White House counsel Alberto Gonzales, who is now the attorney general.
Fitzgerald has said that his investigation is complete except for testimony from Cooper and Miller.
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