Olbermann Connects Harriet Miers to Pre-9/11 Memo
By Brad Wilmouth | October 05, 2005 | 00:32
Leave it to Keith Olbermann to link the topics of Supreme Court nominee Harriet Miers and the 9/11 attacks. On his Countdown show on Tuesday night, the MSNBC anchor relayed that Miers was the person who handed President Bush a memo in August 2001 that warned of Osama bin Laden's desire to attack the U.S. This was the same memo that some on the left have used to justify their criticisms that the President should have foreseen and prevented the 9/11 attacks based on the memo's general warnings about bin Laden's intentions.
Olbermann teased his Tuesday night show with a photograph of Miers handing the President a memo. He dated the photograph as "August 6, 2001, the day [President Bush] got the PDB titled 'Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.'"
Olbermann led his show with the Miers nomination, and, after noting that the President planned not to release Miers' internal White House documents, he returned to the topic of the bin Laden memo, revealing that "there's another document being speculated about tonight," and described the document as the "infamous memo warning [President Bush] that Osama bin Laden was determined to strike in the United States."
A complete transcript of Olbermann's words on the subject follows:
Keith Olbermann, in opening teaser: "Which of these stories will you be talking about tomorrow? The President meets the press. The senator whose quote may have inspired the nomination of Harriet Miers turns out to have been a Democrat. And then there's this photo of Ms. Miers handing the President a document, handing it to him on August 6, 2001, the day he got the PDB titled 'Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.'"
...
Olbermann, at about 8:04 p.m.: "And there's another document being speculated about tonight: This one. Ms. Miers and President Bush in a photograph going over a briefing paper at his Crawford ranch in 2001. We don't know which briefing paper that is in the photo, but we do know that on that very same day, August 6th, a little over one month before the 9/11 attacks, Ms. Miers handed the President the now-famous or infamous memo warning him that Osama bin Laden was determined to strike in the United States."
