White House Awaits Grand Jury News ¶ It’s Rove … Lawrence O’Donnell – Update
Update [2005-10-23 03:30AM PST by Oui]:
By Lawrence O’Donnell | Bio
Huffington Post July 7, 2005 — In February, Circuit Judge David Tatel joined his colleagues’ order to Cooper and Miller despite his own, very lonely finding that indeed there is a federal privilege for reporters that can shield them from being compelled to testify to grand juries and give up sources. He based his finding on Rule 501 of the Federal Rules of Evidence, which authorizes federal courts to develop new privileges “in the light of reason and experience.” Tatel actually found that reason and experience “support recognition of a privilege for reporters’ confidential sources.” But Tatel still ordered Cooper and Miller to testify because he found that the privilege had to give way to “the gravity of the suspected crime.”
Judge Tatel’s opinion has eight blank pages in the middle of it where he discusses the secret information the prosecutor has supplied only to the judges to convince them that the testimony he is demanding is worth sending reporters to jail to get. The gravity of the suspected crime is presumably very well developed in those redacted pages. Later, Tatel refers to “having carefully scrutinized [the prosecutor’s] voluminous classified filings.”
PBS Tavis Smiley Interview with Lawrence O’Donnell – July 18
Tavis: Nice to see you again. I’ve been dying to ask you this for a few days since I knew that you were connected to this. What did Lawrence O’Donnell know and when did he know it?
O’Donnell: Well, he knew what was in the “Time” magazine emails that were under subpoena by the special prosecutor. That subpoena was being defied for a year and a half, as was, as we all know, the two reporters were defying their subpoenas and appealing all the way up to the United States Supreme Court to try to be excused from answering—-
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