The Ongoing Tale of the NAFTA-Canada Memo

Here we go, farther down the rabbit hole.

It turns out that the source of the original leak about the conversation about NAFTA between an adviser from Sen. Barack Obama's campaign and Canadian officials may have been Canadian Prime Minister Steven Harper's Chief of Staff, Ian Brodie.

But it a bizarre twist, The Globe and Mail reports that Mr. Brodie originally told a group of reporters that there had been conversations between the Clinton campaign and Canadian officials. Brodie made the remark as a "throwaway" to a group of reporters from the CTV network during the lockup before the Canadian budget was announced on Feb. 26. (Canadian reporters may see the budget several hours before it is announced in Parliament but are required to go into a secure facility to ensure there are no leaks.)

Mr. Brodie, apparently seeking to play down the potential impact on Canada, told the reporters the threat was not serious, and that someone from Ms. Clinton's campaign had even contacted Canadian diplomats to tell them not to worry because the NAFTA threats were mostly political posturing.

The Canadian Press cited an unnamed source last night as saying that several people overheard the remark. The news agency quoted that source as saying that Mr. Brodie said that someone from Ms. Clinton's campaign called and was "telling the embassy to take it with a grain of salt."

But when CTV, first broke the story, it was about the Obama campaign, not the Clinton campaign. Robert Hurst, president of CTV News, declined to comment on how the story had switched to the Obama camp.

Although Harper has sworn he will get to the bottom of the leaked story, saying that "were 'unfair' to [Obama] and may have been illegal," he denied Brodie was the source of the leak. But the Globe and Mail reports that he seemed to be talking about the actual written memo that described the meeting between the adviser to Obama and Canada's consul-general in Chicago, Georges Rioux.

Update: In an e-mail to OnPolitics at USAToday, the Clinton camp denies it called anybody: "We flatly deny the report," Clinton campaign spokesman Phil Singer says in an e-mail he just sent us in response to our question about whether a Clinton aide said anything to Canadian officials. "We did not sanction nor would we ever sanction anyone to say any such a thing. We give the Canadian government blanket immunity to reveal the name of anyone they think they heard from."

8:55 AM ET | 03- 6-2008 | permalink