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October 05, 2003
Chris Matthews one of the reporter who called Wilson after leak
A new article by Michael Isikoff of Newswee says that both Andrea Mitchell and Chris Matthews were among the reporters who called Joseph Wilson after the initial leak of his wife's connection to the CIA was published, letting him know that they, too, had spoken to Karl Rove and that his wife had come up as part of the conversation.
Whoever initially leaked Plame’s name, the White House clearly had a hand in fanning the flames. Wilson told NEWSWEEK that in the days after the Novak story appeared, he got calls from several well-connected Washington reporters. One was NBC correspondent Andrea Mitchell. She told NEWSWEEK that she said to Wilson: “I heard in the White House that people were touting the Novak column and that that was the real story.” The next day Wilson got a call from Chris Matthews, host of the MSNBC show “Hardball.” According to a source close to Wilson, Matthews said, “I just got off the phone with Karl Rove, who said your wife was fair game.” (Matthews told NEWSWEEK: “I’m not going to talk about off-the-record conversations.”)This will, of course, add more grist to the mill, and shows that, at the very least, once the initial leak had been made, Karl Rove had no problem with trying to spread the information - and the allegations being made by releasing it (that Wilson got the Niger trip mission because of his wife's connections inside the CIA.)The White House spokesman dismissed as “ridiculous” the charge that Rove outed Plame. A source familiar with Rove’s conversation acknowledged that Rove spoke to Matthews a few days after Novak’s column appeared, but said that Rove never told Matthews that Wilson’s wife was “fair game”—rather, that it “was reasonable to discuss who sent Wilson to Niger.”
Note that the "source familiar with Rove's conversation" isn't denying that he contacted Matthews or that Plame was a topic of conversation. He or she is only saying that Rove did not specifically say that Plame was "fair game", though it's not hard to see how someone might get that impression from Rove's comment that it's "reasonable to discuss who sent Wilson to Niger" since the allegation is that it was Plame.
There's more to come - it's mainly just a matter of when at this point, though there's still no guarantee we'll get the top names. Still, there is some hope, right?
[Updated 3:06 am to correct a minor error in a name I'd mistyped]
Posted by thorswitch at October 5, 2003 02:28 AM
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