HOW LIBBY PLAYED "HARDBALL"-AND LOST (Tweety "drew Libby's ire") [View All]

[No Exit]

10.28.05

HOW LIBBY PLAYED "HARDBALL" -- AND LOST

Michael Crowley, Franklin Foer, Jason Zengerle, TNR staff

Here's a passage from today's Fitzgerald indictment:
On or about July 10, 2003, LIBBY spoke to NBC Washington Bureau Chief Tim Russert to complain about press coverage of LIBBY by an MSNBC reporter. LIBBY did not discuss Wilson's wife with Russert.

Who was the reporter drawing Libby's ire? It was almost certainly Chris Matthews. A Nexis search of Libby's name turns up an episode of "Hardball" from July 8, 2003--just two days before Libby vented to Russert--in which Matthews essentially blamed Libby for the faulty Niger uranium reference in the 2003 State of the Union address (emphasis added):

MATTHEWS: Why would the vice president's office, Scooter Libby or whoever is running that office--why would they send a CIA effort down in Niger to verify something, find out there wasn't a uranium sale, and then not follow-up by putting that information--or correcting that information--in the president's State of the Union? If they went to the trouble to sending Joe Wilson all the way to Africa to find out whether that country had ever sold uranium to Saddam Hussein, why wouldn't they follow-up on that?...

It sounds to me, Congressmen, like a hawk in the vice president's office, probably from Scooter Libby on down, got a hold of somebody like Steve Hadley and the NSC, and they put that in Mike Gerson's speech, and the president went along with it without thinking.....

(snip)


http://www.tnr.com/blog/theplank?pid=3172