Alert the media! On Meet the Press today, Tim Russert came thisclose to grilling Bob Novak about inconsistencies in Novak’s recounting of events leading up to his revelation of CIA agent Valerie Plame’s identity:
MR. RUSSERT: Now, Newsday interviewed you a few weeks after your column ran, back in 2003, and quotes you as saying this, “I didn’t dig it out, it was given to me. They thought it was significant, they gave me the name and I used it.”
MR. NOVAK: That was a misstatement on my part. I … I’m … I’ve found I’m much better … I hope I’m not screwing up on this interview because I’m much better interviewing than I am giving interviews. They didn’t give me the name. And of course it was not a “they,” it was one person, which I later checked out with Mr. Rove. They, they … the Newsday article also paraphrased me as saying they came to me, I never said they came to me, because obviously I initiated the interview.
MR. RUSSERT: Newsday stands by that story. And you know if a politician said that, which you said, and contrasted it with what you’re saying now, people would say, “Wait a minute. Something’s wrong here.”
MR. NOVAK: Well, I was wrong when I said they came to me.
MR. RUSSERT: You…
MR. NOVAK: I mean, when I said that they gave me the name, because I got the name from, from “Who’s Who in America.’
MR. RUSSERT: You did say that the column — the story — the disclosure was inadvertent on the part of your primary source. A third party told you that.
MR. NOVAK: A third party close to the primary source called me after the investigation was launched and said, and said that he believed that it was … he believed he had given me inadvertent … inadvertently given me information … this information.
MR. RUSSERT: Have you spoken to your primary source?
MR. NOVAK: No.
MR. RUSSERT: Not since that interview?
MR. NOVAK: No.
MR. RUSSERT: When you were on MEET THE PRESS October of ’03, I asked you about the Newsday piece, and you did repeat, you said, quote, “What I meant was that the senior official had given me her name.”
MR. NOVAK: Well, that, that was just … that’s just a misstatement on my part. He, he … what he said exactly was his wife, his wife had done it. I got the name … because I, I, I realized I didn’t have the name, and I figured out, how am I going to get this name to put in, in the column? So I said, “Maybe it’s in “Who’s Who.” And I looked it up and there it was.
MR. RUSSERT: In fact, you wrote, “I learned Valerie Plame’s name from Joe Wilson’s entry in “Who’s Who” in America. And here is the “Who’s Who” from 2003, Wilson, Joseph Charles IV, ambassador, married to Valerie Elise Plame August 3, 1998. Was that the very first time you had seen or head the name Valerie Plame?
MR. NOVAK: Yes.
MR. RUSSERT: No one told you?
MR. NOVAK: No.
MR. RUSSERT: But they did tell you “his wife.”
MR. NOVAK: He told me his wife worked in the counterproliferation division of the … they did not say she was a covert operative, didn’t say she was a covered operative. A lot of people say, “Well, why’d you call her an operative in the column?” I call all kinds of politicians operatives. It’s maybe a bad habit, I … but I still do it. I see somebody’s running a congressional campaign in Wyoming, I’d call them an operative.
MR. RUSSERT: But having said twice before that you got the name of a senior official…
MR. NOVAK: Oh, a mistake.
MR. RUSSERT: …you can understand why people are…
MR. NOVAK: I understand, I understand, but it was … it’s just not a … it’s just not factually correct and I have, I have testified under oath about this.
MR. RUSSERT: You have?
MR. NOVAK: Yes.
MR. RUSSERT: That they did not give you the name?
MR. NOVAK: Yes.
