State Dept. on WSJ: ‘Right hand wasn’t talking to the far right hand’

[Commentary] The Wall Street Journal endured a double embarrassment October 15. First, a Wall Street Journal editorial bemoaned that Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton had stayed “mute” on the Libya scandal — at the very moment that Clinton was conducting a monster round of interviews with television networks. And to top it off, the Wall Street Journal’s editorializers were criticizing Clinton’s alleged accountabliphobia even though the news side of the Wall Street Journal had been sitting on a big Clinton interview that had gone down five days earlier.

On Oct 10, Sec Clinton sat down with the Journal and told the paper that she took “responsibility” for the Libya affair — a story line that didn’t come out till Oct 15 via CNN. Why did the news side of the Journal have such a fine story and wait five days to push it out the door? Says a State Department official: “They cannot attack us for . . . not doing interviews. They can’t attack us for not taking responsibility and then realize they were wrong” and fail to address the contradictions. “It was just the right hand not talking to the far right hand,” says the official of the intra-Journal mix-up.