Puh-leeze. So now they want the administration to feed Allawi his lines in Arabic?
Kneed to Know
Lawyers can sometimes do the impossible. Acclaimed First Amendment lawyer Floyd Abrams was praised by New York Times columnist William Safire this week for being "no pushover" when it came to standing firm against prosecutorial trickery to get reporters to reveal confidences.
_____In the Loop_____
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Hanging Chads Have Nothing on Rebels (The Washington Post, Sep 29, 2004)
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Red Stars Over Washington (The Washington Post, Sep 27, 2004)
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British Diplomat Ducks His Gaffe (The Washington Post, Sep 24, 2004)
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Thompson's Trading Spaces (The Washington Post, Sep 22, 2004)
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State Dept. Web Site Still Out of the Loop (The Washington Post, Sep 20, 2004)
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More In the Loop
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Friday's Question:
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The trick, now being used by special prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald in the Valerie Plame affair, is to get a "written waiver" of confidentiality from a presumed source -- something government employees could be forced to sign -- and then demand the reporter reveal what the employee said or go to jail for contempt of court.
Abrams's toughness, we learned, stood in sharp contrast to some "weak-kneed Time Inc. lawyer" who allowed Time magazine reporter Matthew Cooper to reveal what Vice President Cheney's chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, talked about. Abrams was retained by the Times to represent its reporter Judith Miller, who also is jousting with Fitzgerald.
So who would the pathetic, weak-kneed lawyer be? Time lawyer Robin Bierstedt? No, no, no, Abrams told us. She's a "powerful and aggressive and militant defender of the First Amendment." So who is this loser?
Turns out that would be the very same Floyd Abrams. But how can Abrams be steadfast and weak-kneed at the same time?
First, he said, because Time didn't buy the waiver ploy. "But it was their view that where I spoke personally to Libby's lawyer, who said in clear and explicit fashion that Libby did not object to Matt testifying," then it would be okay.
Meanwhile, we're told Washington Post reporters Walter Pincus and Glenn Kessler, also targeted by the prosecutor, got similar assurances from Libby's lawyer and told the prosecutor they didn't talk about Plame.
As Safire noted, the New York Times a few years back helped out former national security adviser Robert C. McFarlane when he was accused of being the source of a leak.
Booked
Author! Author! The latest among federal employee/authors is C.S. Miller, a former reporter who's been working at the Justice Department's public affairs operation for the past 9 1/2 years. His first novel, a mystery called "Natural Causes," is about lots of people who turn up dead of natural causes -- or maybe not. The paperback is published by PublishAmerica in Baltimore.
