In 2005, New York Times reporter Judy Miller went to prison for 85 days because she refused to reveal her journalistic sources to federal prosecutors. The Justice Department was investigating who had leaked the fact that Valerie Plame – wife of Joseph Wilson, who had written an article that cast doubt on the Bush administration’s rationale for going to war in Iraq – was an undercover CIA agent. Miller, who had covered the war extensively, refused to divulge to prosecutors her sources inside the government. She spent nearly three months behind bars instead.

As she was being taken into federal custody after being held in contempt for refusing to honor the subpoena, she told the presiding judge, “If journalists cannot be trusted to guarantee confidentiality, then journalists cannot function and there cannot be a free press.” The judge was unmoved. “I have a person in front of me who is defying the law,” he declared. “That’s the child saying: ‘I’m still going to take that chocolate chip cookie and eat it. I don’t care.’”

Miller was imprisoned from early July to September 2005. When I interviewed Miller for my book When You Come at the King, she told me she was never in physical danger; the other inmates respected her because “[t]hey knew I was in because I refused to snitch.” She learned insider tricks, including how to make prison lipstick by grinding up red M&Ms and Skittles. But she suffered as her husband battled a serious illness without her. “The truth is, I was miserable the entire time because he was miserable,” she recalled. Miller was released only after her source — Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, Scooter Libby — consented that she could testify and disclose his identity.

Two decades later, Times reporters might again be forced to choose between revealing journalistic sources or getting locked up.

Last week, Donald Trump’s Justice Department sent teams of FBI agents to the private homes of at least four Times journalists who reported that during his recent trip to Turkey, the president’s new Qatari-gifted airplane had to be switched out due to security concerns,........

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