A little more this morning on the National Journal’s Linda Douglass’s decision to join the Obama campaign. I wrote yesterday that during the Clinton administration, Douglass, then working for CBS News, had to recuse herself from covering close friends Mickey Kantor and Webb Hubbell (the latter because Douglass and her husband had, among other things, vacationed in Greece with the Hubbells, and Douglass’s husband arranged for some lucrative work for Hubbell when he was under great pressure from the Office of Independent Counsel). Now, the New York Times reports that Douglass, who met Barack Obama when she was covering Congress for ABC News, helped prep him for a debate in April 2007:
Ms. Douglass said she maintained contact with his team after she left ABC News in 2006 to study partisan gridlock at New York University and, later, when she had a journalism fellowship at Harvard.
At Harvard in April 2007, she said, she attended two days of debate preparation with Mr. Obama, helping him anticipate questions he might face at a coming debate.
Ms. Douglass said she agreed to help only because she was not working as a journalist and did not expect to return to the business. She said she was enticed to join as a contributor to The National Journal that June because she was excited by the campaign and respected the magazine’s approach to politics. She said she told direct supervisors there about her involvement in the debate preparation.