Christiane Amanpour and NSA Spying

So the NSA was spying on journalist Christiane Amanpour. This is a big story. But as Attytood points out it gets even bigger.

First: how did we find that out?

Why the speculation? It's all the fault of NBC's Andrea Mitchell, and this question that she posed on the air to the New York Times' James Risen -- the reporter who broke the domestic spying story -- earlier today, She asked:

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

He didn't, in fact. But presumedly Mitchell -- Mrs. Alan Greenspan, who seems to know more than she reports (read our earlier post on her role in the Valerie Plame case) -- hears things, or she wouldn't have asked the question.

Now we all know that Ms Mithchell is a Bush administration mole in the NBC news organization but it would appear she is not a terribly bright one. NBC pulled the question from the transcripts but it went out over the air and you can't take that back.

Second:

Then there is the issue of Amanpour's husband, Jamie Rubin, former official in the Clinton administration State Department. You may have forgotten (we did, frankly), but Rubin re-emerged in 2004 -- as a foreign policy advisor to John Kerry. Do husbands and wives use the same telephones and computers? Is the Pope German?

There has been some tinfoil hat speculation that NSA was spying on the Democrats in 2004. As we reported here conservative Republican Paul Craig Roberts suggested that very thing earlier in the week. Well maybe we need to dust those tinfoil hats off.

It's time the Republicans in congress recognize the tyrannical imperial hubris of the Bush administration is no longer a partisan issue. Jazz gives us further proof below with another collection of recess appointments.