MTP Transcript for Feb. 11, 2007

MR. RUSSERT: Later on he said, “Well, formal announcement, maybe, but I think what I’d prefer to do is have a day where I can make the same announcement five times and you guys will all cover it again,” understanding our profession quite well.

But The New York Times wrote a piece, David Broder, headlined “Giuliani Shifts Abortion Speech Gently to Right.”

“As he prepares for a possible run for president—a road that goes deep into the heart of conservative America—Rudolph Giuliani takes with him a belief in abortion rights that many think could derail his bid to capture the Republican nomination.

“But in recent weeks, as he has courted voters in South Carolina, ... Mr. Giuliani has highlighted a different element of his thinking on the abortion debate. He has talked about how he would appoint ‘strict constructionist’ judges to the Supreme Court—what abortion rights advocates say is code among conservatives for those who seek to overturn or limit Roe v. Wade, the 1973 court ruling declaring a constitutional right to abortion.”

“The effect has been to distance himself from a position favoring abortion rights that he espoused when he ran for mayor of New York City, where most voters favor abortion rights.” Is that a challenge for the mayor?

MR. BRODER: It’s a big challenge for him, and I think he will be pinned to his historical position on abortion rights as he becomes a formal candidate. But I think it’d be a terrible mistake to underestimate his potential in this race. The kind of reception that he got yesterday in California has been all over the country in all kinds of Republican audiences. I was struck at a conversation at the last Republican Convention with Haley Barbour, the former party chairman, now governor of Mississippi, who told me that he had taken Giuliani to Hattiesburg, Mississippi, and he said he was like a rock star in Hattiesburg. I figure if he can make it in Hattiesburg, he can make it almost anywhere.

MR. RUSSERT: We will find out.

Howie Kurtz, I want to ask you about the Scooter Libby trial. William Powers in the National Journal has an interesting column where he thinks that the fact that journalists have to testify is good because it will open up in terms of the public being able to see how reporters cultivate relationships to get information. You have a different view of that?

MR. KURTZ: Yeah, I certainly don’t think it’s a good thing at all, and I think the reputation of journalists in this Libby trial have taken a hit. I was in the courtroom when you testified, Tim, and you looked uncomfortable during five hours of cross-examination, cautious, hesitant, as anybody would be. No journalist likes to be on the witness stand when, in this case, Libby’s lawyer was trying to take small statements you’d made and find discrepancies and ask you why, on the one hand, you were willing to talk to the FBI about your conversation with Scooter Libby but you resisted a subpoena. You said that it was because you didn’t want to get into a prosecutorial fishing expedition.

The problem for us as a profession is this: When journalists get up there and testify, beside—leaving aside the First Amendment question—it looks to people like—out there like we have become too cozy with senior Bush administration officials, not so we can ferret out information about national security, not so we can find out about corruption, but, in this particular case, in some cases, acting as a conduit for White House effort to put out negative information about Joe Wilson, Valerie Plame’s husband, a big critic of the pre-war intelligence. And I think that the people out there who don’t follow this all that closely think that we have become part of the club, too much the insiders. And that is a problem for journalism.

MR. RUSSERT: It is different when you can’t finish your sentence or complete your thought, when you’re restricted to yes-no answers. And it is uncomfortable. But it’s—if you’re called, you’re called.

But, Roger, to Howie’s point, do you think that the fact that journalists have to work their sources to get, get information is a bad thing for the public to see?

MR. SIMON: No, I think the public has a healthy realism about how the press operates. But I also have to say, this is a nutty trial that nobody except the people involved in it and the people covering it care about. Once again we have a prosecutor who can’t an indictment for the real crime—leaking the identity of a CIA agent—so he goes instead for the crime of, well, people didn’t tell him the complete truth when they talked to him. I mean, there’s no underlying crime here that anyone has been indicted for. This is just a show trial. And I’ve got to say, even if he’s convicted—and he may not be—but even if he’s convicted, would any judge send to prison a guy named Scooter? He wouldn’t last 48 hours.

MR. RUSSERT: We...

MR. KURTZ: But, Roger, it’s a show trial that has put the spotlight on the Bush administration’s attempt to make a case about pre-war intelligence that turned out not to be true. That matters.

MR. RUSSERT: David Broder, Judy Miller, Matt Cooper and myself, and now Bob Woodward, Andrea Mitchell, Walter Pincus—you’re going to have a significant number of journalists going before a court, which will be all covered. What does that do to journalism?

MR. BRODER: Well, it hurts. And it hurts because I think it opens up something that has been worrisome, I think, to many of us in the press, which is the way in which relationships between reporters and government officials can be used by those government officials to plant stories, in effect, that are damaging to their political enemies using the reporters, in effect, to carry out their political mission. And that’s different from cultivating a source to get information that’s of value to you as a journalist. Here you are being used by the government official to carry out their political work.

MR. RUSSERT: Gwen Ifill:

MS. IFILL: Well, you know, the journalists I talked to are having sort, sort of a collective nervous breakdown about this. We watch you testify, we watch Judy Miller and Matt Cooper and whoever else we end up seeing before this trial is over, and we think, “Well, could my bad handwriting now be part of a, a court trial. Or could my misremembered conversation now make me liable—a person who lies?” And then I think to myself that, in the end, I don’t know where this is going to shake out for us. You’re right, it’s—Roger’s right, in some ways it’s kind of an inside story in that we’re all talking to each other and we’re very crazed about it. And I don’t know that Americans around the world are really worrying about that. But I do know that at some level it’s going to affect the way we do our jobs. On the “NewsHour” this week, one of my colleagues interviewed Tim Rutten from the L.A. Times, and he said he routinely destroys all his notes now. He doesn’t keep anything, and that’s his way of protecting himself against the possibility that someone might want to subpoena notes. Now, I’ve heard reporters say, “Oh, that—from now on I’m just throwing my notes away,” but I’d never heard of someone who’s actually doing that. And I don’t know what kind of implication that has for the business, what kind of implication that even has, not to make it too big a point, but for history books.

MR. RUSSERT: Hmm. It’s a huge question. Thank you all, Gwen Ifill, Howie Kurtz, David Broder, Roger Simon. We’ll be right back after this.

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