Bush Pressured NYT Chiefs on ‘Snoopgate’

So after the NYT Washington bureau has been beaten a couple of times this fall by the Washington Post, did they decide that they’d had enough after the Dana Priest‘s secret prison story? Did they publish the NSA eavesdropping story (finally, after sitting on it for a year) to hit back at the Post’s dogged reporting? Sort of a “We’ll see your secret prisons and raise it one NSA eavesdrop” thing?

Well, it’s clear now that this NSA eavesdropping story isn’t going away anytime soon, is it? Just scan the nation’s front pages. One of the big questions is why the Times held on to the story so long, and now Newsweek’s Jonathan Alter reports that President Bush secretly asked the NYT chiefs to the White House to pressure them into not running the story–a form of which was ready before the 2004 election.

“I learned this week that on December 6, Bush summoned Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger and executive editor Bill Keller to the Oval Office in a futile attempt to talk them out of running the story. The Times will not comment on the meeting, but one can only imagine the president’s desperation,” Alter wrote. “Bush was desperate to keep the Times from running this important story–which the paper had already inexplicably held for a year–because he knew that it would reveal him as a law-breaker.”

Sulzberger and Kelley have had quite the year this year–between Judy “Run Amok” Miller and now this, they probably feel like they’ve spent way too much time commuting back and forth to Washington for meetings, jail visits, and Oval Office pow-wows.

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