Time reporter agrees to deposition
Answers questions on CIA operative
WASHINGTON -- Time magazine reporter Matthew Cooper has avoided the threat of jail by agreeing to be interviewed by Justice Department prosecutors investigating whether White House officials illegally leaked the identity of a covert CIA operative to journalists.
Time magazine said in a statement yesterday that Cooper agreed to give a deposition ''because the one source the special counsel asked about," Lewis ''Scooter" Libby, chief of staff for Vice President Dick Cheney, had waived a confidentiality agreement he had with Cooper. The statement from the Time spokeswoman, Diana Pearson, said that Libby also had agreed to allow the magazine to disclose its agreement with him.
''The deposition, which took place Monday in the Washington, D.C., office of Mr. Cooper's attorney, Floyd Abrams, focused entirely on conversations Mr. Cooper had with Mr. Libby, one of Mr. Cooper's sources for the articles he helped author about the leak in July 2003," the Time statement said. ''Following the deposition, the contempt orders against both Time Inc. and Mr. Cooper were vacated."
An order signed Monday by US District Chief Judge Thomas Hogan and released yesterday cleared Cooper of the civil contempt citation that Hogan had issued for Cooper two weeks ago.
Hogan's Aug. 6 order threatened Cooper with an indefinite stay in jail and his employer with thousands of dollars in daily fines if he did not appear before a grand jury and answer questions about conversations he had with sources about CIA operative Valerie Plame and her husband, former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, an outspoken Bush foreign policy critic. Yet if Cooper had appeared before a grand jury, he and other journalists feared the questions prosecutors asked might require him to divulge anonymous sources.
Time had appealed Hogan's ruling ordering Cooper to answer the questions in the special prosecutor investigation, but many legal analysts said the national news magazine had little hope of convincing the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit that journalists have a special privilege to avoid answering questions about their newsgathering and protect their promise of anonymity to sources. The Supreme Court held in a 1972 case, Branzberg v. Hayes, that journalists' promises of confidentiality to sources must be set aside when a government is investigating and prosecuting a crime.
Cooper's decision to answer some questions about the case was similar to agreements special prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald reached with NBC's Tim Russert and The
In both Kessler's case and Russert's, prosecutors' questions concerned conversations the reporters had in early July 2003 with Libby. Russert and Kessler have said they told Fitzgerald's staff that the senior Cheney aide did not disclose Plame's identity.
Fitzgerald has shown a continuing interest in Libby. Witnesses have said Fitzgerald has e-mails and phone records showing his contacts with reporters and that prosecutors are interested in a story Cooper wrote for Time last summer in which Libby was interviewed.
New York Times reporter Judith Miller and Washington Post reporter Walter Pincus also have been subpoenaed by the grand jury investigating the leak.
The investigation was sparked by a July 14, 2003, column by syndicated columnist Robert D. Novak. The column called into question the findings of Plame's husband, Wilson, whom the CIA had sent to the African nation of Niger in 2002 to investigate contentions that Iraq had tried to buy uranium there for its weapons of mass destruction program.
It can be a felony to intentionally disclose an undercover CIA officer's identity.
