On July 3, 2007, the day after President Bush commuted Libby's sentence, Chris Matthews talked again with former Ambassador Wilson, who reiterated his belief that the Bush administration had inappropriately leaked his wife's then-classified covert CIA identity to retaliate against him politically, in effect targeting her. Matthews asked Wilson: "When did you sense that the White House was trying to destroy your reputation?" and he replied: "Well, it was pretty clear to me shortly after I wrote my article "What I Didn't Find in Africa", when Mr. Novak spoke to a friend of mine on the street and said that, Wilson's a 'blank,' and his wife works for the CIA, that the nature of the smear campaign they were going to run against me was going to include the betrayal of her identity as a covert CIA officer. And that would have been around July 8 or July 9 name=MatthewsJuly2007>[https://web.archive.org/web/20071113194459/http://today.msnbc.msn.com/id/19618592/ "'Hardball with Chris Matthews' for July 3, 5 p.m. ET", "Hardball with Chris Matthews", "MSNBC", updated: July 5, 2007, 2:54 p.m. ET, accessed August 22, 2007. (Transcript; "Guest: Joe Wilson, Bob Bennett, Kate O'Beirne, Ryan Lizza, Pat Buchanan, Norman Pearlstine, April Ryan.")</ref>