Bush spying on CNN?

Posted by Evan Derkacz at 10:11 AM on January 5, 2006.

While interviewing James Risen on the Bush spying scandal (read Jan Frel's excellent summary of Risen's revelations here), NBC's Andrea Mitchell asked whether the Bush administration wasn't spying on CNN's Christiane Amanpour.

As John Aravosis points out, you don't ask a question that specific without believing you know something. It'd be like asking: "say, do you know if there's a recall on the '03 Cadillac Escalade's rear axle?" It's fishy. (Note: Escalade drivers [and GM legal team] fear not, this example was plucked from thin air).

Afterward, however, the NBC transcript was released without this question. But it did come with the explanation that "...It was a topic on which we had not completed our reporting..."

Aravosis reads into it: "NBC did not say it pulled the references to Bush spying on Amanpour because it was inappropriate conjecture about something which Andrea Mitchell had no evidence... No, NBC said it pulled the references because it was still investigating the accusation and didn't want to scoop itself before it was finished investigating. And make no mistake, NBC is 'continuing their inquiry.'"

Aravosis also notes that the transcript retained the question of whether Bush may have been spying on reporters, indicating that they didn't feel that this was idle conjecture...

For those who aren't convinced of how frightening this is and why this sort of thing becomes exceptionally complicated, feeding political ambitions, Aravosis goes into Amanpour's connections here (her husband was a Clinton official with many ties to the Democratic party and they most likely shared a phone, computer or some other communication device that may have offered listeners a line into private Democratic communications...). (Americablog)

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Evan Derkacz is a New York-based writer and contributor to AlterNet.