The NYTimes this morning features a 6,000 word epic on reporter Judith Miller’s travails in the Valerie Plame investigation. Here is the passage that will be causing the most anxiety at the Bush White House – beginning with a meeting between Miller and VP Cheney’s chief-of-staff, Scooter Libby, fully three weeks before Bob Novak’s now-famous column on July 14, 2003, which first identified Plame as a CIA “operative” (though not as a covert agent). The italics are mine:

On June 23, 2003, Ms. Miller visited Mr. Libby at the Old Executive Office Building in Washington. Mr. Libby was the vice president’s top aide and had played an important role in shaping the argument for going to war in Iraq. He was “a good-faith source who was usually straight with me,” Ms. Miller said in an interview.

Her assignment was to write an article about the failure to find unconventional weapons in Iraq. She said Mr. Libby wanted to talk about a diplomat’s fact-finding trip in 2002 to the African nation of Niger to determine whether Iraq sought uranium there. The diplomat was Mr. Wilson, and his wife worked for the C.I.A.

Mr. Wilson had already become known among Washington insiders as a fierce Bush critic. He would go public the next month, accusing the White House in an opinion article in The Times of twisting intelligence to exaggerate the Iraqi threat.

But Mr. Libby was already defending Vice President Dick Cheney, saying his boss knew nothing about Mr. Wilson or his findings. Ms. Miller said her notes leave open the possibility that Mr. Libby told her Mr. Wilson’s wife might work at the agency.

On July 8, two days after Mr. Wilson’s article appeared in The Times, the reporter and her source met again, for breakfast at the St. Regis Hotel, near the White House.

The notebook Ms. Miller used that day includes the reference to “Valerie Flame.” But she said the name did not appear in the same portion of her notebook as the interview notes from Mr. Libby.

During the breakfast, Mr. Libby provided a detail about Ms. Wilson, saying she worked in a C.I.A. unit known as Winpac; the name stands for weapons intelligence, nonproliferation and arms control. Ms. Miller said she understood this to mean that Ms. Wilson was an analyst rather than an undercover operative.

Ms. Miller returned to the subject on July 12 in a phone call with Mr. Libby. Another variant on Valerie Wilson’s name – “Victoria Wilson” – appears in the notes of that call. Ms. Miller had by then called other sources about Mr. Wilson’s wife. In an interview, she would not discuss her sources.

ME: Three things leap out about all this. First, to the extent it indicates that administration officials were focused on Wilson long before he wrote his op-ed (and even longer before Novak wrote his column), it calls into question claims that they were unaware of who Plame was, or that their information about her came from reporters.

While all of Washington has been obsessing over what has been publicly revealed regarding conversations Karl Rove and Libby had with reporters, the special prosecutor has undoubtedly been probing what was going on behind the scenes among administration officials in the weeks between the time Wilson first got on their radar screen and mid-July, when Novak’s column was published. Did they go to school on Wilson? In the course of doing so, what did they learn about his wife? With whom was what they found out shared? (That is, what was the state of their information about Plame when they spoke with reporters?).

Second, if Libby told Miller on June 8 that Plame worked in the CIA in the field of weapons intelligence (the Winpac Unit), that is significantly different from just mentioning in passing that she worked at the CIA. The fact that she worked at CIA was probably widely known. What in particular she did there may have been sensitive – although we don’t know if it was classified, and it may well not have been. Assuming it wasn’t, it would be a bad thing for the VP’s chief-of-staff to have been blabbing to a reporter, and thus embarrassing, but it wouldn’t be a crime.

A significant note here: The Times reports that Miller assumed Libby’s revelation must have meant that Plame was an analyst, as opposed to a covert agent. But for the special prosecutor, of far more moment will be what objectively was the status (classified or not classified) of what Libby told Miller about Plame’s job at CIA. Miller’s subjective understanding about what Libby said is irrelevant. (Put the opposite way, if Miller incorrectly believed that Libby had given her classified information, that would not matter a wit as far as potential criminality is concerned. The salient thing would be whether the information was in fact classified, regardless of what a witness hearing the information may have thought it meant.)

Third, Miller obviously had other sources about Plame/Wilson that she would not discuss with the Times reporters who wrote this story. Of more moment, though, is whether those sources are known to the special prosecutor. If Miller had sources other than Libby (like, say, Joe Wilson) who were revealing information about Miller’s status at CIA, that would seem to be just as relevant as whatever Libby was telling her.

According to the public reporting, Miller was pressed to reveal communications with only one source, Libby, and was released from jail when she relented and did so. Does this mean the investigation is beaming myopically on administration officials? I doubt it. More likely, it means that the special prosecutor has witnesses other than Miller who were able to fill in those blanks. (While reporters don’t have a legal right to withhold information, they will generally be compelled to reveal source information only to the extent that the information cannot be, or has not been, obtained some other way.)