Fitzgerald rejected those considerations too. "Certainly, one who can handle the desert in wartime is far better equipped than the average person jailed in a federal facility," he wrote.
Fitzgerald said it would be up to the judge to decide whether to send Cooper and Miller to the District of Columbia jail or some other facility. Lawyers for the journalists had previously argued against sending them to the D.C. jail, which they described as dangerous and overcrowded.
Fitzgerald is seeking the identities of sources whom the reporters spoke with in the days before Robert Novak exposed Plame in a syndicated column July 14, 2003.
The prosecutor has been investigating charges that the Bush administration leaked Plame's name to several journalists in retaliation for an article that her husband, former envoy Joseph C. Wilson IV, wrote in the New York Times that accused the administration of using faulty intelligence in deciding to wage war in Iraq.
Over the weekend, a lawyer for Karl Rove, Bush's deputy chief of staff, acknowledged that Rove had spoken with Cooper in the days before the Novak article appeared, but denied that Rove had identified Plame or broken the law. The lawyer, Robert Luskin, also said that Rove had signed a waiver freeing up reporters to discuss with Fitzgerald conversations Rove had with them.
Fitzgerald's filing Tuesday indicated that the prosecutor had zeroed in on a single source that Cooper used, but it did not reveal him or her by name.
