UPDATE: Note this little ditty at the end of the Hotline story:
A few blog posts, including one by Philadelphia Daily News' Will Bunch, raise the prospect of whether Amanpour husband/ex-State Dept. spokesperson/KE'04 adviser Jamie Rubin might have been the intended target.Hotline is a must-read for beltway insiders:
When It Rains, It AmanpoursAnd a more:
On the left-hand side, a quieter but curiouser bombshell has dropped, where NBC News has been caught in an error of proportions yet to be determined. Does NBC have evidence that the NSA wiretapped or otherwise spied on CNN's Christiane Amanpour? If so, how did NBC end up accidentally tipping their hand? Or is this all a big misunderstanding? NBC was forced to respond within hours, and it does seem that something more will come of this -- but no one knows how or when that will come about....
EAVESDROPPING I: You Bright And Risen Angles
In mid-afternoon on 1/4, DC-based liberal activist John Aravosis pointed out that MSNBC.com had removed a couple lines from its online transcript a segment of NBC's Andrea Mitchell's interview of NYT's James Risen. In the redacted segment, Mitchell suggested the possibility the NSA had spied on CNN's Amanpour. From the original:
MITCHELL: "Do you have any information about reporters being swept up in this net?" RISEN: "No, I don't. It's not clear to me. That's one of the questions we'll have to look into the future. Were there abuses of this program or not? I don't know the answer to that." MITCHELL: "You don't have any information, for instance, that a very prominent journalist, Christiane Amanpour, might have been eavesdropped upon?" RISEN: "No, no I hadn't heard that."
Compare the above to the version available online, which snips the 2nd exchange. More Aravosis: "Since when is NBC in the business of deleting entire paragraphs from their official transcripts? What's going on here?"
Later that p.m., NBC released a statement to Brian Stelter of TV Newser: "Unfortunately this transcript was released prematurely. It was a topic on which we had not completed our reporting, and it was not broadcast on 'NBC Nightly News' nor on any other NBC News program. We removed that section of the transcript so that we may further continue our inquiry."
== An excited Aravosis followed up, calling the statement "incredibly big news": "NBC has acknowledged that they have information to suggest that Bush may have spied (be spying) on ... Amanpour and that NBC is currently investigating that very possibility. This isn't just conjecture anymore, NBC has confirmed it."
Left-leaning Gary Farber: "It's still just speculation about speculation, no matter how much Aravosis likes to trumpet that sort of thing as "confirmed! proven! fact!" and the like, but it's definitely intriguing."
[NOTE FROM JOHN: Left-leaning Gary Farber should read what I write before he gives cute bitchy quotes. The only "fact" that I claim is that Mitchell said it, that she wouldn't have said it unless she had reason to, and that NBC has now admitted they ARE investigating whether Bush spied on Amanpour. Those are incontrovertible.]
== Header over "Simpsons" vocal wizard Harry Shearer's column at Huffington Post: "Hello, Christiane? What's that Clicking?"
== Atrios: "Either way, it is some story. Andrea Mitchell has reason to think/conjecture/know that Amanpour was spied on by the administration, and for some reason as yet unknown she didn't want that little detail being public yet."
== Josh Marshall: "Despite the fact that it's framed as a question, Mitchell inevitably becomes in some sense a fact witness for the underlying claim. She legitimizes the question and strongly suggests she has at least some evidence that it is true. Okay, so someone at NBC screwed up. Mistakes happen. But the bell can't be unrung."
A few blog posts, including one by Philadelphia Daily News' Will Bunch, raise the prospect of whether Amanpour husband/ex-State Dept. spokesperson/KE'04 adviser Jamie Rubin might have been the intended target. Bunch also suggests "her recent reporting would have brought her into direct contact with members of al Qaeda," but also darkly hints that the U.S. gov't believes she is somehow working on behalf of al Qaeda.
