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Posted on Wednesday 7 February 2007

Arianna does a good job of clarifying the thrust of Wells cross-examination of Russert [I don’t see what his inconsistency has to do with the question on the table, but what do I know about matters legal?]. The bloggers are really rough on Tim Russert. I don’t watch Meet the Press enough to know first-hand, but I gather he is way too willing to be an Administration mouthpiece. Apparently, his interview with Whistle-Blower Richard Clarke was a shameless attack.

The bru-ha-ha with Russert’s cross-examination goes like this. When he was first called by F.B.I. Agent about his phone conversation with Scooter Libby, he talked about it openly – withholding nothing. But when he was called for the Grand Jury, he balked, crying confidentiality. In his statement to avoid testifying, he said:

A conversation between a prominent journalist and a senior government official cannot be artificially parsed or surgically removed from the realities of newsgathering, as the Special Prosecutor apparently contends.

And there is no basis for the Special Prosecutor’s suggestion that the purpose for which a source contacts a journalist somehow governs whether their subsequent communications implicate the newsgathering function. To the contrary, the full-time occupation of a journalist such as Mr. Russert is to uncover newsworthy information from his sources, whether he encounters them in a formal interview, at a cocktail reception, or in a phone call initiated by one of them to complain about news coverage.

I get that this is inconsistent behavior. I get that his argument is pompous. I get that it sounds like someone got to him to try to shut him up. But what I don’t get is what this has to do with the case. He may well be an inconsistent, pompous, Administration tool, but the case is about whether he told Scooter Libby about Valerie Plame’s C.I.A. status. He didn’t apparently even know about it. The rest of the stuff is character assasination, perhaps well-deserved, but unrelated to the “facts.”
Update: I can’t seem to let all of this go quite yet. The more I ponder it, the more I think the thing that explains Russert’s inconsistency is that someone got to him between the F.B.I. call and the Grand Jury supoena and said “Hush up!” Libby’s alibi was going to be his one sided reporting about Russert, who wouldn’t then testify. Fitz may well have broken down the grand plan when he went nose to nose with Judith Miller. So now, the reason Libby looks like such a moron is that he thought he was bullet-proof in the Grand Jury with Miller and Russert taking the “First” [Amendment] path to silence. It’s a much more believable hypothesis than that he’s simply a fool. He may be a fool, but he’s not this kind of a fool.

Oh, the joy of conspiracy theories!

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