QUICK UPDATE….I almost forgot, but since I mentioned it yesterday here’s what happened on Meet the Press: nothing much. Wilson was fine, pretty much repeating what we already knew, and Novak didn’t say anything he hadn’t already said in his columns. They were interviewed separately, so no fights broke out.
Russert asked Dana Priest about her original article, which quoted a “senior administration official” accusing two “top White House officials” of leaking the story. Was that distinction important? Did it indicate that the “senior administration official” was someone in the CIA? Priest said something along the lines of “Well, people always speculate about that stuff, but people are usually wrong,” which might be taken as a hint that her source wasn’t from the CIA. My guess, though, is that it means nothing at all, and was simply her way of saying that idle speculation is just idle speculation.
(She did do a good job of keeping the real story front and center, though: sure, Washington is a leaky town, but a lot of people felt that this leak “crossed a line,” which it certainly did. Two lines in fact: a national security line and a dirty tricks line. Outing a covert agent crossed the first, and using Joe Wilson’s wife in a war against him crossed the second. This is not business as usual.)
And as long as I’m udpating, here’s the Newsweek story that David Corn mentioned yesterday. Aside from the mention of Chris Matthews, it doesn’t really have anything new.
