Libby picked the wrong reporter, but it may not matter
He should have picked Andrea Mitchell, not her boss, Russert, as this CNBC October 3, 2003 transcript shows, via Tom McGuire:
Mitchell: It was widely known among those of us who cover the intelligence community and who were actively engaged in trying to track down who among the foreign service community was the envoy to Niger. So a number of us began to pick up on that. But frankly I wasn’t aware of her actual role at the CIA and the fact that she had a covert role involving weapons of mass destruction, not until Bob Novak wrote it.
We predicted a month ago a parade of reporters at a criminal trial of Libby, and this is what we shall get. On cross examination, it looks as though Andrea Mitchell and her colleagues may help create doubt about Tim Russert’s credibility in his account of the conversation with Libby. It turns out that “all the reporters” did know about Plame. The question of whether the words came from Russert’s mouth seem a finer point. Good fun.