‘Meet the Press’ transcript for June 10, 2007

MR. VAN NATTA JR.:  Well, Senator, Senator Clinton didn’t speak with us for this book, Tim, and...

MR. RUSSERT:  Did you ask her?

MR. VAN NATTA JR.:  We did.  We went to her at the very beginning.  In fact, I reached out to Howard Wolfson, her communications person, and when we told him about this book, he sighed audibly and it was as if somebody had punched him in the stomach, and he let us know that she had heartburn, basically, about this book, and so did Lorraine Voles.  And it went beyond just Senator Clinton not cooperating with us.  She put out the word not only to her aides and friends not to cooperate, and we were lucky that some did, but she also had—some of her people on her staff urged some senators not to talk to us, including Harry Reid.  So I’m not at all surprised by Philippe’s statement.

MR. RUSSERT:  Jeff Gerth, also supporters of Hillary Clinton say your wife is a foreign policy adviser for Chris Dodd, and that’s a conflict of interest, because he’s running against Senator Clinton, and you shouldn’t be authoring a book against one of Senator Dodd’s opponents.

MR. GERTH:  Well, we disclose in the book who my wife is and who she works for, and, you know, she works for Coke and I work for Pepsi, and we’ve kept our lives separate for 25 years.

MR. RUSSERT:  She’s not a source?

MR. GERTH:  No.  There’re 1800 footnotes in this book.  She’s not a source for one of them.  And The New York Times ran 8,000 words of this book at the cover of their magazine, and they independently fact checked the book and knew who the sources were and know that my wife was not a source for anything.

MR. RUSSERT:  Let me turn to some more of the substance in the book, Iraq. And you write that, one, Hillary Clinton did not take advantage of reading a classified briefing, national intelligence estimate, on the war in Iraq.  She admitted to that in a previous debate a few weeks ago, saying that she had been briefed from other sources and places.  But you also say that when she suggests that she wanted a more diplomatic solution to the war, that she voted against attempts to do that, and that her vote that she cast in October of 2002 for the war, in effect, does stand alone because she had a chance to vote for an amendment from Senator Levin and didn’t do it.  Fair?

MR. VAN NATTA JR.:  That is fair, and she had plenty of opportunities to discuss that, and she has not.  She—in 2002 she voted, when she voted for the war resolution, prior to that when she had the opportunity to vote for Senator Levin’s amendment, she didn’t even go to the floor.  She made no statement about it whatsoever.  And so since then these arguments that she’s made that she was for diplomacy really ring hollow.  She had a chance to vote for diplomacy and she passed that up.

MR. RUSSERT:  You say that she didn’t talk about diplomacy as a reason for interpreting her vote until June of 2006.  Supporters of the senator will say, “Wrong, October 17^th, 2003, on the floor of the U.S. Senate, she talked about it.”

MR. GERTH:  No, well, that, that’s not correct, Tim.  What we said in the book and in The New York Times magazine article was that it was—that her, her first public speech about the president misusing his authority, making the charge “misusing the authority” took place in June of 2006 on the Senate floor.  What you’re referring to is remarks that she made in October of 2003 where she said she regretted how the president used his authority.  And supporters of the, of Senator Clinton tried to get The New York Times to correct this one sentence, and The New York Times decided there’s nothing to correct because accusing the president of misusing his authority, which is really—it’s starting down the road to impeachment, is different than saying, “I regret how he used that authority.”

MR. RUSSERT:  She did say “I disagree with the way he used his authority” back in 2003.

MR. GERTH:  Yes, she did.  But she didn’t accuse him of misusing the authority, which is an escalation of the—of, of her statement.

MR. VAN NATTA JR.:  And they demanded that—the Clinton campaign demanded a correction from The New York Times on this point.  It was one sentence that was in our New York Times magazine cover excerpt last week, and the Times editors looked at it carefully and decided it should not be corrected.

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