A strange encounter with Robert Novak

Toward the end of that week, network producers and television correspondents were calling with rapidly mounting frequency. We had clearly entered a new phase. The questions were no longer about whether or not Valerie was CIA; rather, they sought to uncover some supposedly as-yet-unexplained link between the two of us and the trip to Niger.

Over the weekend, the calls became more insistent and more pointed. And the sources being cited by the reporters were consistently "White House officials or senior White House officials," so I could only conclude that the decision to push the story had been made at a high level in the administration. At that point, I knew that I would have to address the issue more publicly.

NBC's Andrea Mitchell, who had been guest-hosting "Meet the Press" when I'd been on the show two weeks earlier, reached me at home on the Sunday night after Novak's article appeared to ask for my reaction to "what White House sources were telling her about the real story being not the sixteen words but Wilson and his wife." I agreed to do an interview with her the following day in my office. Although I had planned not to appear on any television shows prior to Thursday, July 24, when I was scheduled to do "The Daily Show" with Jon Stewart, I felt I had no choice but to try to stop the White House from continuing to push this canard.

The principal question remained unanswered: Who had so badly served the president? Who Valerie was and what she did, or who I was and what I did, were merely the administration's means of obfuscating the real issue and confusing the public. The White House was trying to fling dust into the eyes of the press and public while descending into what a Republican staffer on the Hill later called a "slime-and-defend" mode.

On Monday morning, July 21, I sat down with Andrea and answered her questions. I was scrupulous in speaking about Valerie only hypothetically; I was careful to qualify my statements and to use the subjunctive: "If she were as Novak alleged, then..." In response to Andrea's questions regarding statements made by White House officials about Valerie's professional life and its connection to me, I noted that the sources of the original leaks from the administration to Novak might have violated the law.

When the interview aired on the Monday evening news, NBC had systematically edited out every one of my qualifiers regarding Valerie's status, no doubt because of time constraints. They thus substantively changed the tenor of the interview and gave CIA lawyers cause to briefly consider whether or not I myself might have been in violation of the same law as the senior administration officials who had originally leaked the information about Valerie to Novak. I later called Andrea to request a copy of the full interview, so as to be able to defend myself, but NBC policy disallows providing transcripts of interviews in their unedited versions. I asked Andrea therefore to make sure that the full interview was preserved on tape in the event legal questions arose in the future. She agreed to do so.

That afternoon I received the call from Chris Matthews tersely informing me that Karl Rove had entered the fray with the comment that my wife was "fair game." To make a political point, to defend a political agenda, to blur the truth that one of the president's own staffers had scripted a lie into the president's mouth, one of the administration's most senior officials found it perfectly acceptable to push a story that exposed a national security asset. It was appalling.

The next morning I appeared on the "Today" show. Katie Couric was the interviewer. Unfortunately, I was on remote location, in Washington -- my one chance to sit face-to-face with "America's sweetheart," and all I could see was the unblinking eye of the camera in front of me. At least the spot was televised live, so the hypotheticals that I used to qualify what I said about Valerie were not edited out. Again I made the point that the leak might well have been a violation of the law.

Although I received hundreds of phone calls from the national and international press in subsequent days, not once did I again hear a reporter cite White House sources in relation to that particular story. In the weeks ahead, the attacks from the White House reverted to more typical forms of character assassination.

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