What's Judy Miller hiding?

Topic: Judith Miller Karl Rove Valerie Plame US politics

In the run-up to the war in Iraq, Judy Miller proved herself willing to do the administration's bidding when it came to WMDs and Ahmed Chalabi's uncorroborated assertions.

Now she's in jail for refusing to reveal the sources who may have committed a federal crime by outing Valerie Plame as a CIA agent. This outing was likely done in order to discredit her husband's disproving of the Nigerian uranium claim made by Bush in his State of the Union speech.

But another journalist who reported the same story, Matthew Cooper, said he'd gotten permission from his source to reveal the source's name — said to be Karl Rove — to a grand jury.

It's very hard to believe that Rove would deny such permission to Miller, who had been so useful to him, and grant it to Cooper.

So Miller must be going to jail for some other reason. It seems likely that it's another source of this information, which might explain Rove's release of Cooper. If Rove knew that Valerie Plame's name was already public knowledge, he might be no more worried about prosecution for discussing her than I am.

So who is Miller hiding?