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November 16, 2005

Watergate's Bob Woodward the first reporter to get Plame leak? Testifies under oath, apologizes to Washington Post

Woodward Was Told of Plame More Than Two Years Ago: WaPo reporters report on a WaPo manager:

Washington Post Assistant Managing Editor Bob Woodward testified under oath Monday in the CIA leak case that a senior administration official told him about CIA operative Valerie Plame and her position at the agency nearly a month before her identity was disclosed.

In a more than two-hour deposition, Woodward told Special Counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald that the official casually told him in mid-June 2003 that Plame worked as a CIA analyst on weapons of mass destruction, and that he did not believe the information to be classified or sensitive, according to a statement Woodward released yesterday....

Woodward Apologizes to Post for Withholding Knowledge of Plame. Howard Kurtz puts this online:

Bob Woodward apologized today to The Washington Post's executive editor for failing to tell him for more than two years that a senior Bush administration official had told him about CIA operative Valerie Plame, even as an investigation of those leaks mushroomed into a national scandal.

Woodward, an assistant managing editor and best-selling author, said he told Leonard Downie Jr. that he held back the information because he was worried about being subpoenaed by Patrick J. Fitzgerald, the special counsel in the case.

"I apologized because I should have told him about this much sooner," Woodward said in an interview. "I explained in detail that I was trying to protect my sources. That's Job No. 1 in a case like this. . . .

"I hunkered down. I'm in the habit of keeping secrets. I didn't want anything out there that was going to get me subpoenaed."...

Kurtz adds that,

Woodward said today he had gotten permission from one of his sources, White House chief of staff Andrew H. Card Jr., to disclose that he had testified that their June 20, 2003 conversation did not involve Plame, the wife of administration critic Joseph C. Wilson IV. He said he had "pushed" his other administration source, without success, to allow him to discuss that person's identity, but that the source has insisted that the waiver applies only to Woodward's testimony.

Fellow Post man Dan Froomkin writes The Scoop on Woodward:

In a startling development reported in today's Washington Post, it now appears that Bob Woodward was the first reporter to whom a senior administration official leaked the identity of CIA operative Valerie Plame.

Woodward is an assistant managing editor at The Post and the best-selling author of insider accounts of the Bush White House. He is best known as part of the team of journalists that broke the Watergate story that ended Richard Nixon's presidency three decades ago.

More recently Woodward -- who is working on his third book about the Bush administration -- had been publicly scornful of special prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald's investigation.

Today's shocker adds a whole new prologue to the story as we knew it and once again thrusts the issue of journalistic conduct into a debate that many journalists would prefer was solely about White House conduct. It also calls new attention to Woodward's unique relationship with the Bush White House.

Froomkin's long post includes a blog wrap and a link to incoming blog reactions to the original Post revelation at Technorati.com

Here's a wider net for the term "Bob Woodward" at the blog search engine.

Over at E&P, Joe Strupp has Pincus: Woodward 'Asked Me to Keep Him Out' of Plame Reporting in which Walter Pincus, a Post reporter who testified before the grand jury, "said he believed as far back as 2003 that Bob Woodward had some involvement in the case but he did not pursue the information because Woodward asked him not to."

Also at E&P: Woodward Had Offered to Serve Part of (Judith) Miller's Jail Time for Refusing to Testify

Updates to come.

Then: Reporters Bob Woodward, right, and Carl Bernstein, whose reporting of the Watergate case won a Pulitzer Prize, sit in the newsroom of the Washington Post in this May 7, 1973 AP photo

Posted by Sheila Lennon  at 2:57 PM | Permalink