Posted by WLS:

As reported today by Michael Calderon over at Politico, Milbank says that he began working on a deal with CNN on July 7, and that his dissatisfaction with Olbermann/Countdown/MSNBC went back a couple months. He says it was a conversation in early July he had with one of Olbermann’s producers about why he hadn’t been booked on the show for a couple weeks that led him to look at options with CNN.

Milbank says that Olbermann’s producer told him that there was some concern on the staff about a “favorable” comment Milbank had made about McCain adviser Charlie Black in June.  From the Politico story:

Here’s the exchange from June 23, where Olbermann talked to Milbank on-air about Black’s statement to Fortune magazine, that a terrorist attack would be a “big advantage” for the McCain campaign.

OLBERMANN: But where do we go in terms of this story from here? Does McCain have to, whether he likes it or not, fire Charlie Black or face having this bell along with other bells around his neck all summer and all fall?

MILBANK: Well, he’s going to wait and see. I imagine they are certainly going to hope that this becomes a 24-hour thing that blows over. Which it well could be, depending on what events happen in the coming days. But if it keeps being brought back to them, they’ll have to take some action here.

The irony here is that Charlie Black is a very soft-spoken, well-liked figure, and this does seem rather out of character for him to sound off in this way.”

Amazingly, MSNBC confirmed that a producer did mention Charlie Black in the conversation that Milbank recounts, but states the producer was only kidding.

I said yesterday that it seemed clear from Olbermann’s own comment that he was uneasy about whether Milbank would go about trashing McCain in the general election in the same manner he was reliably called upon to trash Bush/Cheney.  Its clear now that Olbermann canned him for that very reason, and the dust-up over Milbank’s July 30 column was just a convenient excuse.

That’ll be all the more clear in the weeks and months ahead as Milbank shows himself to be a more even-handed analyst of the general election campaign on CNN.