Woodward Now Implicated In Plame Inquiry - Testified Yesterday To Grand Jury

by Steve

What do Bob Woodward and Judy Miller have in common?

Both have been stooges for the administration.

Both have been complicit in the administration’s disinformation campaign against the American people.

Both are more concerned about being on the inside as Beltway Kool Kids than they are about being journalists.

And it turns out both have been more intricately involved in the Valerie Plame outing than they ever admitted publicly or more importantly to their bosses who sign their checks. In Woodward’s case, that didn’t stop him from commenting publicly that Fitzgerald had nothing of consequence, when in fact we find out in tomorrow’s Post that Woodward was doing spin work for the White House, had been dragged into a grand jury appearance recently by Fitzgerald, and then created a lie about a conversation with Walter Pincus, who promptly cut Woodward’s legs off today.

When you read the Post piece in tomorrow’s paper, you come away with the understanding that Woodward got information about Plame from a third “senior administration official” before Scooter gave the same information to another reporter. On the surface, this appears to be an effort by Libby and Cheney and the third senior administration official to undercut Fitzgerald by undermining a key claim in the indictment that Libby was the first government official to reveal Plame’s identity to a reporter. But as the Post piece states, this does nothing to get Libby off the hook for the issues Fitzgerald indicted him for.

Furthermore, for Woodward of all people, who wrote the book “Veil” about Bill Casey’s CIA, to not know that a CIA analyst working on WMDs in the directorate of Operations was in fact a covert assignment, is simply implausible. Woodward is in trouble here, as is the third “senior administration official”. We now see that Libby was involved, Rove was involved, Cheney was involved, and a third SAO was involved who recently released Woodward from a pledge of confidentiality. It is also interesting that the Post saw a need to immediately get this story out less than two days after Woodward’s supposedly secret grand jury testimony.

So what else is coming? Well, it is clear that Woodward may have told Fitzgerald something about his alleged conversation with Pincus that Pincus will be able to swat back across the net quite easily.

Woodward's statement said he testified: "I told Walter Pincus, a reporter at The Post, without naming my source, that I understood Wilson's wife worked at the CIA as a WMD analyst."

Pincus said he does not recall Woodward telling him that. In an interview, Pincus said he cannot imagine he would have forgotten such a conversation around the same time he was writing about Wilson.

"Are you kidding?" Pincus said. "I certainly would have remembered that."

Stay tuned. But Woodward can kiss off his remaining credibility.