Judith Miller, the New York Times reporter who has been jailed since July 6 for refusing to testify in the CIA leak case, was released from a Virginia detention center on Thursday afternoon after she and her lawyers reached an agreement with a federal prosecutor to testify before a grand jury investigating the matter, the paper's publisher and executive editor said.
Miller was freed after spending more than 12 weeks in jail, during which she refused to cooperate with the criminal inquiry. Her decision to testify came after she obtained what she described as a waiver offered "voluntarily and personally" by a source who said she was no longer bound by any pledge of confidentiality she made to him. She said the source had made clear that he genuinely wanted her to testify.
That source was Lewis Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, according to people who have been officially briefed on the case.
Miller met with Libby on July 8, 2003, and talked with him by telephone later that week. Discussions between government officials and journalists that week have been a central focus of the investigation.
Miller said in a statement that she was expecting to appear before the grand jury yesterday. Miller was released after she and her lawyers met at the jail with Patrick Fitzgerald, the prosecutor in the case, to discuss her testimony.
Fitzgerald has for more than a year sought testimony from Miller about conversations she had with Libby. Her willingness to testify was based in part on personal assurances given by Libby earlier this month that he had no objection to her discussing their conversations with the grand jury, according to those officials briefed on the case.
Fitzgerald's investigation has centered around the question of whether anyone in the Bush administration illegally disclosed to the news media the identity of an undercover CIA employee, Valerie Wilson, whose name was first published in July 2003 in a syndicated column by Robert Novak.
Miller never wrote an article about Wilson.
"I went to jail to preserve the time-honored principle that a journalist must respect a promise not to reveal the identity of a confidential source. I chose to take the consequences -- 85 days in prison -- rather than violate that promise. The principle was more important to uphold than my personal freedom," Miller said.
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