Legal News

Tim Russert, Newsman and Law-School Grad, Dies at 58

By Jamie Heller

With sadness, we report that Tim Russert, the host of NBC’s “Meet the Press” and its Washington bureau chief, collapsed and died at work Friday after suffering an apparent heart attack. He was 58.

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Tim Russert signed off after an interview with John McCain during a taping of “Meet the Press” in January.

Russert, born in Buffalo, New York on May 7, 1950, is a graduate of Canisius High School, John Carroll University and from the Cleveland-Marshall College of Law.

According to his bio on MSNBC, before joining NBC News, Russert worked as a counselor in the New York Governor’s office in Albany in 1983 and 1984 and a special counsel in the United States Senate from 1977 to 1982.

Russert will forever have a place in two historic legal cases. On election night 2000, his famed analysis of electoral votes on his handheld whiteboard served as a bookend to the Supreme Court’s controversial decision in Bush v. Gore.

Last year, he testified as a witness in the government’s controversial perjury prosecution of Dick Cheney aide Lewis “Scooter” Libby. The government alleged that Libby lied during the probe of the leak that lead to the outing of former Central Intelligence Agency operative Valerie Plame.

Libby maintained he first learned about Plame from Russert. But on the stand, during over an hour of sometimes confusing questions from one of Libby’s lawyers, Theodore Wells, Russert didn’t budge from his contention that he couldn’t have told Libby about Plame since he didn’t know it at the time. The case ended in a conviction, though President Bush later commuted the 30-month sentence to spare Libby a prison term.

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on June 13, 2008 (boomark / email).