Novak on Meet the Press: Retract and Spin
Crooks and Liars has the video of Bob Novak's appearance on Meet the Press this morning. Christy at Firedoglake provides her view.
Shorter version: Novak now claims he made a mistake when he told Newsday one week after his infamous column in which he outed Valerie Plame that his primary source gave him Valerie Plame Wilson's name.
Novak, in an interview, said his sources had come to him with the information. "I didn't dig it out, it was given to me," he said. "They thought it was significant, they gave me the name and I used it." [my emphasis]
Memories weaken upon the passage of time, they become comingled with post-event information --things the person experiencing the event later hears and reads about the case -- so that often it is no longer possible to distinguish between their original memory of the event and the blended memory that is created by what they heard, observed or later learned from others. Novak's memory is undoubtedly a mish-mosh now, but it wasn't one week after the event.
I'm going with what Novak said then: his primary source, who is no partisan gunslinger, not only told him Joseph Wilson's wife had a role in sending him to Niger but supplied her name.
Here's one post from last week on Novak Then vs. Novak Now.
Update: Editor and Publisher has the majority of the transcript.
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