Let’s remember that Scooter Libby was PO’ed at Chris Matthews. He had Adam Levine and Catherine Martin in the VP’s office review the transcripts of the HardBall. Chris Matthews was hammering Libby and Cheney during this time. Matthews was pushing a theory that Hawks (Perle, Libby and Wolfowitz) cherry picked information and get us into this war. Matthews went so far as to infer that Libby and Cheney knew the information that they were pushing was false. Libby had Adam Levine, a old Hardball producer, now working the VP’s office to call Matthews and ask him to back off. Well, that conversation didn’t go well. Libby then called Tim Russert who was/is in charge of the Washington News Bureau for NBC news (MSNBC is a division of NBC [I’m not exactly sure of the relationship but I know that Russert is senior to Matthews.]) Libby lays into Russert according to Russert (all of this is in the Hubris). Russert immediately called the president of NBC, Neal Shapiro, to relate his conversation with Libby.
It is my opinion that even though this is a side story, it points to state of mind. Scooter was living and breathing the Iraq War at this time. He was trying to fight off any criticism of the pre-war intel.
