Curiouser and Curiouser…..

On Tuesday, NBC News correspondent Andrea Mitchell was interviewing James Risen, the NYT reporter who broke the NSA wiretap story.

The transcript is available on MSNBC’s website — the only problem, however is that it has been edited.

Edited to remove the following reference (caught by several politcal blogs):

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.

This passage no longer appears in the official transcript. Seems minor, right? She asks a question, he says no.

Consider this, however:

Andrea Mitchell is a pro. She’s not going to float something like that so publicly and specifically, unless she’s going somewhere with it. So she’s heard, from some source, that Amanpour was the subject of easedropping.

Makes sense, in a twisted way….after all, journalists have good sources, and Amanpour often talks to high-value targets. Wiretapping her would definitely give some good intel, despite its illegality.

However: Such a wiretap would likely include her home, office, and cell phones, and email correspondence. That means anyone Amanpour has conversed with in the past four years, at least by phone or email, could have had their conversation taped by the US government. That also means that anyone who uses any of her telephones or computers (work or home) could also have had their conversation bugged.

Amanpour’s husband is former Clinton administration senior official Jamie Rubin, who was spokesman for the State Department. Jamie Rubin was also chief foreign policy adviser to General Wesley Clark’s presidential campaign, and then worked as a senior national security adviser to John Kerry’s presidential campaign.

If he ever used his home phone, his wife’s work phone, his wife’s cell phone, their home computer or her work computer to communicate with John Kerry or Wesley Clark, those conversations would have been bugged if Bush was tapping Amanpour.

See where this is going?

…and MSNBC has deleted the passage from the official transcript.

Something to think about.

EDIT: Courtesy of — NBC has issued a statement about the deletion, saying that the transcript “was released prematurely” and that “it was a topic on which we had not completed our reporting.” Read the statement and an analysis of what it means here, on AmericaBlog. I have to agree with the assessment: NBC has essentially confirmed that they have information to suggest that Bush may have spied (be spying) on CNN’s Christiane Amanpour and that they are currently investigating. That’s huge.