The Gray Lady's Gray Area
Byron Calame pretends to come clean today, forcing the NYT to admit that it knew about the NSA domestic spying story before the 2004 elections. Come clean, you say? Then he must have revealed precisely when Risen first had the story, right?
Not really.
Calame comes closest to revealing precisely when the NYT had the NSA story when he says,
Holding a fresh draft of the story just days before the electionalso was an issue of fairness, Mr. Keller said. I agree that candidatesaffected by a negative article deserve to have time — several days to aweek — to get their response disseminated before voters head to thepolls. [my emphasis]
So we’re to assume, I guess, that the decision to hold the story was made closer than "several days" or "a week" to the election, but before the election, just days before.
By the same logic, shouldn’t the major news media have held the story of bin Laden’s conveeeenient new videotape until a few days after the election? Or did they only want to be â€fair†to one candidate?
Torquemada Gonzalez was asked about the visit to Asscroft’s hospital bed in a hearing some months ago (Senate Judiciary, I think) and he refused to answer it because it happened with reference to a DIFFERENT PROGRAM than the one the Prez had publicly admitted to. It was pretty clear that Torquemada was acknowledging that the bedside authorization visit took place, but that it was NOT the terrorist surveilance program. I wonder which program it was?
I am trying to locate a transcript of this hearing, to get a more accurate quote.
I have no idea whether the Libby thing intersected with the NSA thing in fall 2004. But I don’t think I’ve ever noticed just how weird the Libby-Miller angle actually is. The Van Natta et al piece you cite in your earlier post has Abrams reportedly telling Miller and others at the Times that Libby’s lawyer
passed along some information about Mr. Libby’s grand jury testimony: that he had not told Ms. Miller the name or undercover status of Mr. Wilson’s wife.
But that’s exactly what Miller testified to! So why should it be troubling to Miller? Why would the notes about (variations on) Plame’s name in her notebook present a potential conflict, as the Times article asserts, since, as Miller went on to testify, she couldn’t link those to Libby and in fact professed to believe they didn’t come from him? Why would Tate’s info about Libby’s testimony signal he didn’t want her to testify? Obviously, one answer is that Miller was in fact successfully coached by Libby, and lied. But the story makes no internal sense. Which is probably why Miller presents a different variation on what she heard via her lawyer from Libby’s lawyer, where Tate presses for what she was going to say. But then we are expected to believe that Miller believed that Libby was worried about her not exonerating him, even though the one piece of info on Libby’s testimony Tate evidently felt compelled to pass on meshed with her own professed recollection. Again, the point is not whether any of this is true or not, the point is that Miller’s story seems to make no sense even on its own terms.