It's Going Down Slow
Truth Coming Out of the Woodward

I've been trying to be productive today, but had to take a break and weigh in with a round-up of Bob Woodward's very interesting/intriguing revelation. Dan Froomkin at the WaPo's White House Briefing sums it up:

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.
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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.
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Woodward's source was apparently neither Libby nor presidential adviser Karl Rove, widely seen as Fitzgerald's most likely next target. And Woodward wouldn't specify the date of the disclosure any further than to say it was in "mid-June." Nevertheless, that definitely pre-dates Libby's first mention of Plame's identity during his meeting with New York Times reporter Judith Miller on June 23.
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Fitzgerald obviously didn't know about it at his October 28 press conference , where he asserted that "Mr. Libby was the first official known to have told a reporter when he talked to Judith Miller in June of 2003 about Valerie Wilson."

Salon's War Room weighs in with some questions:

So many questions. For starters, who are the three officials Woodward talked to on background for his book and who is the mysterious figure who suddenly, for reasons we can only speculate, decided to notify Fitzgerald about this only recently? Karl Rove's spokesman says that Turd Blossom was definitely not the source. Is there still some elusive figure in all this that we don't know about? Is it the same person who was the second yet-to-be named source for that Novak column back in the middle of July in 2003? What more does Woodward, a critic of the investigation, know? And how much, if anything does this have to do with Libby's defense strategy wherein his lawyers apparently are planning to try and compel as many journalists as they can to testify about any notes or records they might have relating to his case.

William Jeffress Jr., one of Libby's lawyers, seized on Woodward's testimony, citing it as evidence that the focus on Libby may not be as accurate as once thought, and that there may be other things that Fitzgerald doesn't know about. "Why did Mr. Fitzgerald indict Mr. Libby before fully investigating what other reporters knew about Wilson's wife?" Good question. Anyone think we'll get the answer?

Matt Yglesias over at TPM Cafe notes this about Mr. Libby:

Yes, this shows that Patrick Fitzgerald's overall understanding of what happened was a bit off-base, but of course Fitzgerald's point in bringing perjury charges was and is precisely that he can't develop a sound overall understanding of the situation as long as people are misleading investigators. Libby, meanwhile, stands accused of lying about Russert. I'm not sure what kind of evidence could get him off the hook for that charge, but certainly what's coming out about Woodward isn't it.

I gotta say, this whole thing is a bit sad. All the President's Men has long been one of my favorite movies and it gave me--as a bookish, nerdish kid--some heroes to look up to that weren't gun-toting action heroes. Yes, it was a movie rendition of real life, but I bought it. And now the image of Woodward as the dogged investigative reporter is now being replaced by an apologist shill who's more concerned with producing chart-topping books.

Of course this also gets caught up in the whole debate over journalistic source disclosure (Fitzgerald didn't have his name until just a few weeks ago, so he wasn't compelled to disclose this publicly); but it's ethically troubling that he didn't disclose this to his own editors until last month.

Here's a post over at Media Matters that captures both these threads nicely:

According to the Post: "Downie said Woodward had violated the paper's guidelines in some instances by expressing his 'personal views.' " Kurtz wrote further: "Woodward said today that he 'had a lot of pent-up frustration' about watching Fitzgerald threatening reporters with jail for refusing to testify, while 'I was trying to get the information out and couldn't' because of his agreement with his administration source."

While Kurtz refers to "some instances" in which Downie said Woodward violated the Post's guidelines, there were in fact numerous appearances on television and radio in which Woodward attacked Fitzgerald's investigation, defended reporters, or downplayed the significance of the alleged conduct of administration figures. Woodward described the investigation as an assault on First Amendment protections of the press. On the July 11 edition of CNN's Wolf Blitzer Reports, Woodward claimed Fitzgerald's investigation was "just running like a chain saw right through the lifeline that reporters have to sources who will tell you the truth, what's really going on," and was "undermining the core function in journalism."

Yes, protection of sources is an important linchpin of investigative journalism. But this again brings up the question of protecting sources if those sources aren't necessarily telling the truth (or are at least trying to assassinate the character of a whistle blower) and whether one can ethically continue to protect a source under these circumstances.

And speaking of ethics, there's this from Editor and Publisher:

Walter Pincus, the longtime Washington Post reporter and one of several journalists who testified in the Valerie Plame case, 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.

"He asked me to keep him out of the reporting and I agreed to do that," Pincus said today. His comments followed a Post story today about Woodward's testimony on Monday before special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald, in which Woodward reportedly disclosed that a senior White House official told him about Plame's identity as a CIA operative a month before her identity was disclosed publicly.