Ms. Miller's new memoir recounts that after her conditions had been met and Mr. Fitzgerald asked the court to release her from jail in September 2005 [where he'd had her imprisoned for 85 days for refusing to reveal her sources], she was summoned to testify before the grand jury. While Mr. Fitzgerald prepared her, she recalls, his pointed queries led her to believe that a four-word question regarding Joseph Wilson surrounded by parentheses in her notebook—"(wife works in Bureau?)"—proved that Mr. Libby had told her about Ms. Plame's CIA employment in a June 23, 2003, conversation (well before Mr. Libby's phone conversation with Russert). She so testified at trial in 2007.
Three years later, Ms. Miller writes, she was reading Ms. Plame's book, "Fair Game," and was astonished to learn that while on overseas assignment for the CIA Ms. Plame "had worked at the State Department as cover." This threw "a new light" on the June 2003 notebook jotting, Ms. Miller says, since the State Department has "bureaus," while the CIA is organized into "divisions."
Ms. Miller, who had spoken to many State Department sources around the same time she spoke to Mr. Libby, says in her memoir that she then realized she must have begun her conversation with him wondering whether Mr. Wilson's wife worked at the State Department. Ms. Miller also now understood that "If Libby, a seasoned bureaucrat, had been trying to plant her employer with me at our first meeting in June, he would not have used the word Bureau to describe where Plame worked."
Mr. Fitzgerald, who had the classified file of Ms. Plame's service, withheld her State Department cover from Ms. Miller—and from Mr. Libby's lawyers, who had requested Ms. Plame's employment history. Despite his constitutional and ethical obligation to provide exculpatory evidence, Mr. Fitzgerald encouraged Ms. Miller to misinterpret her ambiguous notes as showing that Mr. Libby brought up Ms. Plame.
If Ms. Miller had testified accurately, she would have dealt a severe blow to Mr. Fitzgerald's central contention that Mr. Libby was lying when he said he was surprised to hear Russert mention Ms. Plame.
