Judy Miller Fails Again Pretending Obstruction of Justice Is Protected by the First Amendment

Miller is now 0 for 2 against Fitz in the Supreme Court. Adam Liptak for the NY Times reports: The United States Supreme Court refused yesterday to stop a federal prosecutor from reviewing the telephone records of two reporters for The New York Times. The records, the newspaper said, include information about many of the reporters’ confidential sources. (…) Yesterday’s order effectively allows the United States attorney in Chicago, Patrick J. Fitzgerald, to begin reviewing the records, which he has already obtained from the reporters’ phone companies, as early as this week. (…) The grand jury, in Chicago, is looking into who told the reporters, Judith Miller and Philip Shenon, about actions the government was planning to take in December 2001 against two Islamic charities in Illinois and Texas. The disclosures to the reporters, the government lawyers wrote on Friday, may have amounted to obstruction of justice. In August, a three-judge panel of the federal appeals court in Manhattan ruled, 2 to 1, in favor of Mr. Fitzgerald, saying that the reporters were not entitled to shield their sources in the unusual circumstances of the case. The government contended that the reporters had tipped off the charities to the impending actions against them. The Times said the reporters had engaged only in routine newsgathering. (…) Ms. Miller, who retired from The Times last year after serving 85 days in jail in connection with an unrelated leak investigation also supervised by Mr. Fitzgerald, said the phone records by themselves might not satisfy the government.