On Sunday, April 9, the New York Times reported on page A1 that the Vice President’s former Chief of Staff I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby had been authorized to leak to former Times reporter Judith Miller that Iraq was “vigorously trying to procure uranium” to produce a nuclear bomb.
The Times piece said that Libby was told to overstate the intelligence.
But on Wednesday, Libby filed a correction to accompany his original court filings (from which the Times had gotten its information). The correction explained that he was not told to oversell the intelligence. Details of the letter were made available to the media on Tuesday night, and The Washington Post ran a piece on Wednesday explaining Libby’s correction.
The Times, however, did not publish the new Libby filing until today, because, as an Editor’s Note points out in today’s Times, a voicemail and an email with the information “went unnoticed.”
—Gabriel Sherman
