Following up -- this transcript of Andrea Mitchell being interviewed about Joe Wilson and Valerie Wilson was posted on February 12. The Libby defense team pushed to have Ms. Mitchell testify, on the basis of some rather fuzzy statements, in the Libby trial. In spite of the strenuous defense efforts, both sides seemed unsurprised, and possibly somewhat relieved, to have Mitchell excluded as a witness. Andrea Mitchell, rather a social-chat kind of journalist more than your hardnosed Frank Fontana type (Murphy Brown, kids), would have been tied up in knots on the witness stand; in fact, she probably would have been tied up in knots just raising her hand and being sworn as a witness. Even Imus got her tangled up on air.

Here is Mitchell’s interview in the complete NBC transcript:

Oct 3, 2003, on Capital Report (NBC):

“GLORIA BORGER, co-host:

There was good news on the economy today with jobs rising for the first time since January. But the White House was preoccupied with the rapidly moving investigation into the possibly criminal outing of a CIA agent.

ALAN MURRAY, co-host:

Joining us now, NBC's Andrea Mitchell. Andrea, thanks for being with us.

ANDREA MITCHELL (NBC News): Thank you.

MURRAY: We have news that a memo was sent today to the White House, asking for information about this leak very quickly. In fact, there's a deadline set for next Tuesday. Looks like they're trying to move rapidly on this, right?

MITCHELL: They are. They are trying to narrow the focus of the investigation, and try to wrap it up as quickly as possible. And truth be told that if they are going to find anything and the track record on these leak investigations is that they rarely do, because journalists don't want to disclose their sources. But if they do find something, they want to do it as quickly as possible. And in this case, you've got a very small universe. All they have to find out is who are the people at the CIA who first talked to Bob Novak? We pretty well know that. That's been disclosed. And who were the people who talked to Novak and to at least these two other reporters from Newsday who have been mentioned in the White House memo, and that should be easily ascertained.

BORGER: Andrea, can you sort of explain to us how this story, which really started in July--I mean Ambassador Wilson wrote his piece criticizing the administration on July 6th. A week later, Bob Novak writes his column, talking about Ambassador Wilson's wife, and here we are at the beginning of October, and suddenly it's news.

MITCHELL: Well, it does seem a little mysterious. Why all of a sudden is there some political agenda going on? And obviously, there is a lot of politics going on here.

BORGER: Really?

MITCHELL: You know, shocking that politics would be taking place here in Washington, and there's a lot of hypocrisy on all sides. I mean, this is a situation where Democrats, including Hillary Rodham Clinton, have been calling for a special counsel. The very people who all during the Clinton years fought and fought and fought, she most primarily, fought against having a special counsel. And Republicans who always said, you know, that the Justice Department cannot handle this are saying, 'Well, why can't John Ashcroft handle this?' You know, just substitute Janet Reno's name for John Ashcroft, and you see just how silly all this appears on the surface.

But why did it take so long? July 6th, Joe Wilson comes out and discloses that he was, indeed, the secret envoy who went to Niger for the CIA, and this is an op-ed on a Sunday morning in the New York Times. Well, Saturday night, we see that this is coming, so I was substituting on "Meet The Press," and called Wilson and said, 'Would you come on?' And we had him come on the show, so he's also on television. Now that certainly was a double whammy as far as the Bush administration was concerned. Interestingly, Bob Novak was also one of my invited on that guests on that program a different subject, so they clearly met for the first time, Wilson and Novak that day.

BORGER: That's interesting.

MITCHELL: Great ironies. That week, I followed up. We did a report on NBC.

BORGER: Did Wilson's wife come, by the way, to the studio or not?

MITCHELL: Not at all.

BORGER: OK. All right. Just thought I'd ask.

MITCHELL: Separate lives. So that week, on the 8th of July, I did a story on "Nightly News" about Wilson's allegations focusing on Niger, the uranium, not focusing on any issue involving his spouse. Then on the 14th, the bombshell from Novak, which was the revelation which clearly he says came from two administration officials--he wrote that in his column--that she was a covert--rather an operative, as he put it, at the CIA. The clear implication that she had somehow been involved in getting him to take this assignment and in somehow positioning him, that this was part of the overall attempt of the CIA to go up against the White House and to challenge the president's policy. So this is where it fits within the ongoing wars which are only becoming more heated between the Cheney-Bush White House, Rumsfeld hard-liners on weapons of mass destruction, and the more skeptical analysts and operatives, CIA officers, covert officers at both the CIA and the State Department.

We should point out that I did do a story after that, on July 21st. I interviewed Wilson, did a story on the fact that he was now alleging that there was an attempt to bring his wife into it, that this was an administration attempt to intimidate him. So it was on the air in July. But then the CIA secretly asked the Justice Department to look into this. The Justice Department took its sweet time, frankly, came back to the CIA and said, 'Answer these 11 questions: Was she covert? Was there a possible violation?' Eleven questions had to be answered prima facie. The CIA responded to the Justice Department. And last Friday, as we reported at the time, the Justice Department said, 'OK, we're going to proceed and investigate.' That's why the lag time.

MURRAY: Andrea, a couple of quick questions. One, you said something earlier that I wasn't sure about. Bob Novak reported that two administration officials told him this. Are we any closer to having any idea who those two people are?

MITCHELL: No. And you know, there's a lot of rumor. There's been denials from the White House. Joe Wilson, he now inappropriately suggested that Karl Rove may have been the person. What he really should have been saying is that he believes Karl Rove was circulating the story after Novak put it out. So we don't know who that person was. There have been suggestions regarding the vice president's office. These have been denied. But it's really...

MURRAY: Right.

MITCHELL: ...inappropriate, I think, for any of us to suggest that someone might have been involved, because we're talking about a possible crime, and we have no evidence of that.

MURRAY And the second question is: Do we have any idea how widely known it was in Washington that Joe Wilson's wife worked for the CIA?

MITCHELL: It was widely known among those of us who cover the intelligence community and who were actively engaged in trying to track down who among the foreign service community was the envoy to Niger. So a number of us began to pick up on that. But frankly I wasn't aware of her actual role at the CIA and the fact that she had a covert role involving weapons of mass destruction, not until Bob Novak wrote it.

MURRAY: All right. Andrea, thanks very much for being with us.

MITCHELL: My pleasure."