John Miller, a former ABC News reporter who is now a police official, plans to testify at a terrorism trial about his reporting on al Qaeda, which the Wall Street Journal says is a new wrinkle in the debate over whether the Justice Department has intruded on press freedoms. Miller, now deputy commissioner of intelligence and counterterrorism at the New York Police Department, has been preparing to testify about his conversations surrounding a 1998 interview he conducted with Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan.
Federal prosecutors want his testimony as they try to convict Khaled al-Fawwaz of conspiring to kill Americans with twin bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998. The seeking of evidence from reporters has become a hot-button issue, particularly after leak investigations involving reporters at the Associated Press, the New York Times and Fox News Channel forced the Justice Department to rewrite some of its rules on how it gathers evidence about reporters. Attorney General Eric Holder is working on further revisions to the policies, which could be announced soon.