TNR's Michael Crowley deconstructs one point of the Libby indictment, to identify, who at NBC was Libby complaining to Tim Russert about? And the answer? Apparently, Chris Matthews, who was blaming Libby for the 16 words. Writes Crowley:

...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.....

I want to stick with -- Just to recap, here's what we know. Joe Wilson, a former ambassador in the United States government, was sent to Niger to establish there whether there was in fact an arms deal for nuclear materials between Saddam Hussein and the government of Niger. He came back and reported back to the CIA at the behest of the vice president's office, that there was no such deal. That office of the vice president, whoever is in there, Scooter Libby on down, or the vice president himself, never told the president that there was nothing to that, that that was a dry hole story. And yet, the president went on television, telling the American people it was true. Somebody's to blame here, and it's a very high level and it's not speculating.

Libby apparently didn't take kindly to Matthews's analysis.

Fascinating, check it out. For an administration that so disparages the media, what comes out of the indictment is its extraordinary hyper-sensitivity to it.

Posted by Laura at October 29, 2005 10:16 AM