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From Romanesko: Secretary of State Colin L. Powell's deputy press secretary "pulled the plug" while Powell was being interviewed by Tim Russert on Sunday's "Meet the Press." Russert calls the incident "press management gone berserk."

The official State Department response is that Russert went over his allotted ten minutes of interview time, that Fox News (!) was waiting to do theirs immediately afterward, and that State "didn't want to keep them waiting".

I tape MEET THE PRESS every week, so this was a funny little surprise waiting for me on the TiVo yesterday evening. I'm guessing State Department press aide Emily Miller is now out looking for a new job, if anyone in the DC area is hiring...

UPDATE 5/18/04: via Wonkette, here's WaPo's Richard Leiby:

Despite an outcry among media types, the State Department yesterday offered its full support for controversial press aide Emily J. Miller, who shocked both her boss, Colin Powell, and "Meet the Press" host Tim Russert when she ordered a cameraman to stop filming an interview with Powell that ran a few minutes over schedule Sunday in Jordan.

"I think she's great and she's doing a good job for us," Richard Boucher, State's top spokesman, told us. "Russert went on and on and on. We asked the cameraman to help us cut it off. He did and moved the camera."

...In 2001 Miller was working as press secretary to then-Majority Whip Tom DeLay when she lashed into Post Magazine writer Peter Perl while he was doing a profile of her boss, screaming: "You lied! . . . You betrayed him! You twisted his words! . . . We don't know you. You don't exist. . . . You are dead to us." A DeLay spokesman told us yesterday, "Tom thinks Emily did a fine job for him."

People still really say "You are dead to us"?

posted by Gus at 9:02 AM | |