BACK ON THE STAND

摘要

It was August 2004, and special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald was zeroing in on I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby as the leaker in the Valerie Plame case. Fitzgerald had been quizzing reporters, searching for evidence that the vice president's chief of staff had leaked the identity of the CIA covert operative to a news organization in an attempt to undermine her husband, former ambassador Joseph Wilson, who had been an irritant to the Bush administration. Wary of identifying their confidential sources, reporters from big news organizations like The Washington Post and NBC were talking to Fitzgerald under strict ground rules aimed at narrowing the scope of his questions.