NY Times Executive Editor Bill Keller seems to have decided that Judith Miller is too heavy a load to carry. He told the Times staff in an email that Miller had “misled” her editors about her role in the Plame affair.
This seems to support Mickey Kaus’s claim that Sulzberger, not Keller, was Miller’s patron. And it also suggests that Miller is so radioactive within the Times newsroom that Keller judges that he can, or even must, diss the publisher in order to put some daylight between himself and Miller.
The Times, instead of reporting on its own troubles, printed an AP story; by contrast, the Washington Post assigned Howie Kurtz to stick a pin in its rival.
Crooks and Liars has the full text of the email.
The two stories tend to confirm the Hamsher/emptywheel “mousetrap” theory about Miller’s two-stage testimony and her “discovery” of her notes of meetings with Libby. She neglected to mention her June meeting with Libby until confronted with White House logs; then she said she didn’t think they discussed Plame at that meeting. Then she reviewed the notebook showing otherwise, and came back the following week to clean up her testimony. The mysterious “discovery” seems to have disappeared from the new accounts; in the Post story, it is simply “another notebook that had been subpoenaed.”
No wonder Robert Bennett, Miller’s lawyer, was nervous about her writing a story and unwilling to let her show that notebook to her colleagues. If he was nervous that his client might be indicted, he had reason to be.