Could this be more of a mess? In October 2003, Andrea Mitchell appeared on the Capital Record, a now defunct CBS program and said these things [from just-one-minute]:
MURRAY: Andrea, a couple of quick questions. One, you said something earlier that I wasn’t sure about. Bob Novak reported that two administration officials told him this. Are we any closer to having any idea who those two people are?
MITCHELL: No. And you know, there’s a lot of rumor. There’s been denials from the White House. Joe Wilson, he now inappropriately suggested that Karl Rove may have been the person. What he really should have been saying is that he believes Karl Rove was circulating the story after Novak put it out. So we don’t know who that person was. There have been suggestions regarding the vice president’s office. These have been denied. But it’s really…
MURRAY: Right.
MITCHELL: …inappropriate, I think, for any of us to suggest that someone might have been involved, because we’re talking about a possible crime, and we have no evidence of that.
MURRAY: And the second question is: Do we have any idea how widely known it was in Washington that Joe Wilson’s wife worked for the CIA?
MITCHELL: It was widely known among those of us who cover the intelligence community and who were actively engaged in trying to track down who among the foreign service community was the envoy to Niger. So a number of us began to pick up on that. But frankly I wasn’t aware of her actual role at the CIA and the fact that she had a covert role involving weapons of mass destruction, not until Bob Novak wrote it.
A month later, she appeared on Imus [twice] and disavowed/retracted the comment. Now, there’s a battle raging over whether or not to allow her to be called as a witness for the defense in the Scooter Libby Trial tomorrow. The logic goes like this. Mitchell said she knew about Valerie Plame before the phone call between Scooter Libby and Tim Russert on July 10th, 2003. Since Andrea Mitchell works for NBC News with Russert, Libby’s lawyers hypothesize that she had told Russert [or they mutually knew] about Plame’s C.I.A. employment. So Russert did [possibly] know about Plame. And so he did [possibly] tell Libby about her C.I.A. employment on the phone like Libby claims. Then, Mitchell and Russert later conspired to cover it all up for reasons unspecified and Mitchell did the retraction thing. Russert and Mitchell are lying, not Libby.
I am totally and completely glad that I didn’t go to Law School – totally and completely…
[see Libby: The Fight Over Andrea Mitchell and Andrea Mitchell’s Prime Time Lies]
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