Update: 3:30 pm"Mr. Fitzgerald himself took out of the case the outing of Valerie Plame as a covert agent," Specter continued. "We knew that the leak was Armitage long before Libby was ever called as a witness. We have Judith Miller kept in jail for 85 days. I visited her in the jail on the issue of reporter's privilege. That court case cost several million dollars to prosecute. And there are a lot of ramifications that I think we ought to go into. Why were they pursuing the matter long after there was no underlying crime on the outing of the CIA agent? Why were they pursuing it after we knew who the leaker was?"Leahy said afterwards, "I think if my friend Arlen, and like me, he's also -- you know, we were both former prosecutors. That's where we first met. And we tend to take a prosecutor's view on this. If he has no objection to Mr. Fitzgerald coming forward, I think you may very well see Mr. Fitzgerald before the Senate Judiciary Committee."
"On these things, what I've always done is discuss them first with Senator Specter because we tried to take a bipartisan attitude toward these matters," Leahy added. "But I have some of the very same questions in mind that Senator Specter has laid out very well. And I think you might find it to be an interesting hearing."
[A]as Media Matters for America has repeatedly noted, while Armitage leaked Plame's identity to syndicated columnist Robert D. Novak, who later revealed that information in a column, according to evidence and testimony at former vice presidential chief of staff I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby's trial, Libby was a source of the information about Plame's CIA employment for at least two other journalists -- The New York Times' Judith Miller and Time magazine's Matthew Cooper.
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