petardier

James Risen, the NYT reporter who broke the domestic wiretap story, was asked today if he knew anything about reporters being spied on. He was also asked specifically if Christiane Amanpour was spied on. Risen had no information about either question.

Just what might the government learn by spying on Amanpour? Her husband Jamie Rubin, a former Clintion administration official, was a policy adviser to both the Kerry and the Clark presidential campaigns. If he ever used his home phone to contact prominent Democrats, government officials (or anyone else for that matter) he could have been recorded. Concrete scenarios like this make it clear just what kind of politically interesting information might come to light via spying on journalists. Are we to believe that the Bush administration would respect the privacy of any useful campaign-related information that it discovered? All we know for sure now is that Bush has admitted bypassing the law.

Here's the whole story:

http://americablog.blogspot.com/2006/01/what-it-means-to-john-kerry-wesley.html

NBC has apparently removed the portion of the transcripts that mentions spying on reporters from their web site. I've no idea what that means.