Reporter Questioned in CIA Leak Inquiry

NBC News said its Washington bureau chief, Tim Russert, was interviewed Saturday by prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald in connection with a conversation Russert had last summer with top Cheney aide I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby.

The network said Russert, host of "Meet the Press," was asked "limited questions" about a telephone conversation that the White House aide had initiated in early July last year. Libby had disclosed the conversation to the FBI.

The network said in a statement that Russert told Fitzgerald during the interview that he did not know Valerie Plame's name or her identity as a CIA operative until reading Robert Novak's syndicated column published July 14, 2003.

NBC officials had previously said that Russert was "not a recipient of the leak."

Fitzgerald is investigating whether anyone in the administration broke a federal law prohibiting intentional identification of an undercover operative by disclosing information about Plame to Novak.

Plame is married to former State Department envoy Joseph C. Wilson IV, a critic of the Iraq war, who in a recent memoir speculated that Libby was "quite possibly the person who exposed my wife's identity."

Novak's disclosure of Plame's name and her employment at the Central Intelligence Agency came eight days after Wilson, in an op-ed column in the New York Times, criticized the Bush administration's use of prewar intelligence about Iraq's interest in purchasing uranium.

Russert is the second journalist who has acknowledged answering questions from Fitzgerald about phone conversations with Libby, and the second to deny that the Cheney aide had tipped them off about Plame.

A representative of the Washington Post said in June that one of the paper's reporters had recounted a similar conversation with Libby and that Plame's name did not come up.

A spokesman for Libby said that the White House was continuing to cooperate in the investigation but declined further comment, referring questions to the Justice Department, which also declined comment.

Saturday's interview came after a federal judge in Washington ordered Russert and Matthew Cooper, a correspondent for Time magazine, to respond to questions from Fitzgerald.