Yesterday I promised to offer some more thoughts on the NSA story. The thing that's been nagging me about this story is the timing. We know Risen brought the story to his editors at The New York Times in October 2004 and they took a pass. Given that by that time the NSA surveillance program had already been active for somewhere between one and two years, only a complete fool would believe the timing to be a coincidence. Obviously, the intention was for the story to have maximum impact on the Presidential election. That leaves us with three basic options:

Option 1: Russell Tice, who has now come forward as one of Risen's sources and a "whistleblower" in the case, wanted to damage Bush's reelection. This explanation doesn't make sense for a number of reasons. Tice may have had a bone to pick with the NSA, but so far there doesn't seem to be any evidence he harbored ill will directly toward President Bush. Nor do we have evidence so far that Tice was partisan in any way – unlike fellow "whistleblower" Joe Wilson.  Furthermore, if Tice's main motivation was to damage President Bush, he could have easily gone public or leaked his story to any number of other media outlets that would have published the story prior to the election.

Option 2: James Risen had motives for the timing of the story. This is certainly plausible, and Risen's reasons could have been either political (wanting to see John Kerry elected) or professional (he saw increased odds of winning a Pulitzer by dropping such an explosive story during a time of high interest). Or maybe it was a little of both.

Option 3: Some as yet unidentified source or sources engineered the timing of the story.

If we are looking for the motives behind a story intended to do political damage, and we work under the assumption that all parties involved in this affair were acting rationally and in their own self interest, then it follows that the people most likely to be involved would be ones who care most about political outcomes - in other words, partisan operatives and politicians.

We’ve already established that there is little evidence so far suggesting Russell Tice is a partisan, and while James Risen may not have been a big fan of Bush and was complicit in the timing of the story, it’s safe to assume his primary self interest was to get a big scoop with his name on it into print. That leaves us pondering who else among Risen's dozen or so sources would have partisanship as a compelling interest.

Given that this was such a secretive program, the list of people who would have had the knowledge of the NSA surveillance operation and the motivation to put Risen onto this story would be pretty short.

We know, for example, that the White House only briefed a handful of Congressional leaders on the matter. We also know that two of the Democratic members who were made aware of the NSA program, Senator Jay Rockefeller and Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi, wrote and sealed letters at the time expressing their concerns and objections.

Finally, we also know from a strategy memo discovered in late 2003 written by a staffer of the aforementioned Senator Rockefeller – the ranking member on the Senate Intelligence Committee – that Democrats were actively exploring options to damage President Bush’s reelection by “pulling the trigger” on an independent counsel investigation on intelligence-related issues in 2004.

This is, of course, nothing more than informed speculation. But the timing of all the different elements surrounding the NSA story suggests Risen was fed this story by people with partisan motivations. Hopefully the Justice Department investigation will help get to the bottom of it all.