The New York Times Magazine quotes Harry Reid as saying Joe Lieberman 'double-crossed' him on health care reform. Reid, Lieberman clash over letter

For the second time in a week, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) finds himself at the center of a political imbroglio stemming from something that he said in private that was subsequently broadcast to the outside world by unnamed sources.

Just as the furor over Reid’s racially charged remarks about President Barack Obama seemed to be fading, a new controversy was brewing over a soon-to-be published story in The New York Times Magazine that quotes Reid as telling unnamed associates that Sen. Joe Lieberman “double-crossed” him on health care reform.


Reid reportedly accused the Connecticut independent of blindsiding him last month when he went on “Face the Nation” and declared that he’d have “a hard time” backing a Reid-brokered Medicare compromise in the health care bill. But Leiberman is pushing back hard — and to make his case, he has provided POLITICO with a private letter he wrote Reid setting out his concerns before he aired them on national TV.

In a preview of a magazine profile of Reid posted Wednesday on the newspaper’s website, reporter Adam Nagourney writes that Reid was infuriated by Lieberman’s Dec. 13, 2009, appearance on CBS’s “Face the Nation.” Reid felt betrayed, Nagourney reports, because Lieberman had reportedly given him the impression he would back leadership during a closed-door meeting two days earlier.

After Lieberman’s bombshell interview, according to Nagourney, an incensed Reid fumed to unnamed associates, “He double-crossed me. ... Let’s not do what he wants. Let the bill just go down.”

Eventually, Reid — who in early 2009 shielded Lieberman from attempts to strip him of a key committee chairmanship — relented and ditched the Medicare plan to salvage the bill.

The Times’s account of Reid’s behavior squares with what many Democratic aides have been saying privately for weeks: that Lieberman in private had assured Democrats he’d go along with Reid but changed his tune at the moment of his greatest political leverage.

But Lieberman adviser Marshall Wittmann said Lieberman made it “crystal clear” to Reid that the Medicare proposal was a deal killer. He says Lieberman “does not believe Sen. Reid would say the words attributed to him.”

Reid’s office had no comment. And Nagourney stands behind the story, saying, “There’s no question, and no one is disputing, that Reid felt double-crossed by what Lieberman did.”

But Wittmann says that assertion has no basis in fact, and he took the extraordinary step of providing a copy of a private letter written by Lieberman to Reid on Dec. 10, three days before the CBS appearance.

In it, Lieberman voices objections to the deal but stops short of explicitly saying he would vote against it.

“Regarding the ‘Medicare buy-in’ proposal, the more I learn about it, the less I like it,” Lieberman writes in the letter, which was marked “Personal and Confidential” and copied to Sens. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Mark Pryor (D-Ark.).

“There are also concerns about what impact this Medicare buy-in idea would have on Medicare solvency and Medicare premiums,” he added. “I have a feeling I will not be the only member of our caucus who will not want to see this Medicare buy-in proposal adopted.”

Democratic aides familiar with the situation scoffed at the letter, seizing on the fact that Lieberman never explicitly made clear his intention to oppose the Medicare effort — and dismissing it as an attempt by Lieberman to preserve his reputation.

“He put it in writing because he needed to find a way to slink back from the previous commitment he made to the leader,” said a Democratic staffer.

Lieberman, astutely anticipating the wave of liberal criticism, acknowledged he backed a “similar idea [that] was part of the Democratic platform of 2000 which I ran on with Al Gore” but denied his reversal was a flip-flop.

“That was a very different time,” he said, contrasting his two positions. “The federal government had a surplus [in 2000], Medicare wasn’t facing imminent bankruptcy, and there wasn’t a health care reform bill that created a vast new system of subsidies and tax credits and exchanges.”

Lieberman also took a swipe at House progressives who backed the expansion of Medicare to people older than 55, writing that the Reid deal would be “a big step toward a single-payer system as Congressman Anthony Wiener and others have explicitly said.”

Despite the obvious tension, the tone of Lieberman’s letter was cordial, at times playful. At one point, he tells Reid: “I have great respect for you and great trust in you. (I even like you.)”

He even offered Reid advice on how to handle liberals angry that a Medicare expansion and the public option had been stripped from the bill.

“My hope is that you can convince our progressive colleagues to declare victory since real people will see real benefits if your bill passes,” Lieberman wrote.

The Lieberman scrap comes at a sensitive time for the embattled Reid, who must still reconcile the relatively conservative Senate health care bill with a much more liberal House version that contains a public option.

The good news for Reid is that the outcry over his racially insensitive remarks in “Game Change,” the tell-all book published by veteran reporters Mark Halperin and John Heilemann, seems to be dying down.

On Wednesday, he got another important statement of support when first lady Michelle Obama told reporters that Reid doesn’t owe her an apology — because of his history on African-American issues and his support for her husband.

“Harry Reid has no need to apologize to me because I know Harry Reid. I measure people more so on what they do rather than the things they say,” the first lady said in a roundtable interview with POLITICO and other media outlets.