On Tuesday, NBC’s Andrea Mitchell conducted what is quickly becoming an infamous interview with the New York Times’ James Risen, author of the new book State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration and the guy who, along with Eric Lichtblau, broke the domestic spying story in the Times last month.

During the interview, she asked him a couple curious questions, which caught the attention of some bloggers:

Mitchell: Do you have any information about reporters being swept up in this net?

Risen: No, I don’t. It’s not clear to me. That’s one of the questions we’ll have to look into [in] the future. Were there abuses of this program or not? I don’t know the answer to that

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

Risen: No, no I hadn’t heard that.

Yesterday afternoon, AmericaBlog noted the startling implication: one would assume that if Mitchell asked such a specific question about a reporter possibly having been wiretapped, someone gave her some information alluding to this possibility. Then, a few hours later, NBC apparently cut the Amanpour question from the online transcript.

Late last night, Mediabistro’s TVNewser, having asked NBC for an explanation, posted the network’s statement:

“Unfortunately this transcript was released prematurely. It was a topic on which we had not completed our reporting, and it was not broadcast on ‘NBC Nightly News’ nor on any other NBC News program. We removed that section of the transcript so that we may further continue our inquiry.”

That raises more questions than it answers. As Attytood wrote last night, some...

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