Matt Ortega

Scary day if you’re Christiane Amanpour, her husband, family members, the cleaning lady or even the dog.

Some in the blogosphere are questioning if Christiane Amanpour was wiretapped by President Bush’s NSA domestic spying program after a very interesting line of questioning from NBC News’ Andrea Mitchell to New York Times reporter James Risen:

Well this is getting interesting. NBC just delete two paragraphs from its Andrea Mitchell interview, the paragraphs that talked about whether Bush was wiretapping ace CNN correspondent Christiane Amanpour (kudos to Atrios for spotting this).

Here’s what the NBC “official” transcript used to say (I copied this text from NBC’s own page only 2 hours ago):

Andrea Mitchell: Do you have any information about reporters being swept up in this net?

James Risen: No, I don’t. It’s not clear to me. That’s one of the questions we’ll have to look into the future. Were there abuses of this program or not? I don’t know the answer to that.

Andrea Mitchell: You don’t have any information, for instance, that a very prominent journalist, Christiane Amanpour, might have been eavesdropped upon?

James Risen: No, no I hadn’t heard that.

NBC later edited the transcript and removed any mention of Christiane Amanpour possibly being wiretapped. I guess Chris Matthews is the webmaster of MSNBC.com. Atrios calls it a “mystery.” I want to know why it was edited out of their official transcript. Whatever it is, Andrea Mitchell knows or heard something to make her believe the possibility of a wirtetap on Amanpour was plausible, so much that she would specifically say a journalist by name. She needs to start singing like Jack Abramoff, and right now.

Crooks & Liars has the video from NBC’s The Today Show where Risen spoke about the explosive article that disclosed the story, which he co-authored. He also talks about his new book, State of War, which sounds like something I will have to check out.

John of AMERICAblog has eight important questions to ponder (and hopefully get answers to) about this revelation:

1. Such a wiretap would likely include her home, office, and cell phones, and email correspondence, at the very least.2. That means anyone Christiane has conversed with in the past four years, at least by phone or email, could have had their conversation taped by the US government.

3. That also means that anyone who uses any of Christiane’s telephones or computers (work or home) could also have had their conversation bugged.

4. This includes Christiane’s husband, former Clinton administration senior official Jamie Rubin, who was spokesman for the State Department.

5. Jamie Rubin was also chief foreign policy adviser to General Wesley Clark’s presidential campaign, and then worked as a senior national security adviser to John Kerry’s presidential campaign.

6. Did Jamie Rubin ever use his home phone, his wife’s work phone, his wife’s cell phone, her home computer or her work computer to communicate with John Kerry or Wesley Clark? If so, those conversations would have been bugged if Bush was tapping Amanpour.

7. Did Jamie Rubin ever in the past four years communicate with any elected officials in Washington, D.C. - any Senators or members of the US House? Any senior members of the Democratic party?

8. Has Rubin spoken with Bill Clinton, his former boss, in the past 4 years?