September 16, 2003 or Shortly After: 9/11 Commission Executive Director Zelikow Reportedly Understates Amount of Contacts with Rove in Interview with Reporter

9/11 Commission Executive Director Philip Zelikow is interviewed by New York Times reporter Philip Shenon about contacts between Zelikow and White House adviser Karl Rove. According to Shenon, “Zelikow said that there had been only one exchange of phone calls with Rove months earlier and that they involved questions involving his old job at the Miller Center at the University of Virginia” (see June 23-24, 2003). However, there has recently been another exchange of calls (see September 4-15, 2003) and this is the source of some controversy on the Commission, so it is unclear how Zelikow could have failed to mention it (see September 15, 2003 or Shortly After). Shenon writes a “modest article” about the issue for the Times, but it will not be published due to a number of other, seemingly more important, stories. Shenon will later speculate that there were more than just two exchanges of calls between Rove and Zelikow, pointing out that, although records of some calls into the Commission were kept, outgoing calls were not logged in any way: “The General Services Administration, which maintains some of the telephone records from the 9/11 Commission, would not release records showing the specific telephone numbers called by Zelikow on his cell phone. But the records do show frequent calls to phone numbers in area code 202, which is Washington, that begin with the prefix 456-. That prefix is exclusive to phone numbers at the White House.” However, Shenon will also point out that “many if not most of the calls were almost certainly routine.” [Shenon, 2008, pp. 172-174]