Report: Reid thought interview with "Game Change" authors was off the record

Reid wasn’t on guard — perhaps because he’d been told by his staff that the meeting would be “off the record,” according to a person with knowledge of the exchange…

Like virtually every Washington political insider, Manley had a long and warm relationship with Halperin, the longtime political director for ABC News who once set conventional wisdom in Washington with “The Note.”

Maybe Reid and Manley — thinking back to their many candid exchanges over the years — simply assumed that Halperin wouldn’t burn him or his boss. Or maybe he expected that Halperin would check back with him on any quotes he planned to use?…

Heilemann said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe”: “We had a very clear agreement with all those sources that our interviews would be on deep background. … Our ground rules are … that we won’t identify any of our sources as the sources of the material. But we said to them all very clearly that if they put themselves in scenes of the book, if they were uttering dialogue to people in the book in part of a scene, that we would identify them as the utterer of those words.”