Woodward tells Time that he prompted his source to confess to Fitz

[kpete]

Posted Friday, Nov. 18, 2005
As reporters keep scrambling to find out who told Bob Woodward about Joe Wilson’s wife, Woodward himself has told TIME about a related mystery: what made the source finally come forward. When the Washington Post reporter went public with his involvement in the CIA leak case earlier this week, he failed to explain why his source waited silently for two years before coming clean to special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald. In an interview today, Woodward described the sequence of conversations with his source and Post executive editor Leonard Downie, Jr. that led to the latest twist in Fitzgerald’s investigation into the outing of CIA operative Valerie Plame, the wife of administration critic Wilson.

In the final weeks before the grand jury indicted vice presidential aide I. Lewis ("Scooter") Libby on Oct. 28 for perjury and obstruction of justice, Woodward says he was asked by Downie to help report on the status of the probe. In the course of his reporting, Woodward says, "I learned something more" about the disclosure of Plame's identity, which prompted him to admit to Downie for the first time that he had been told of Plame’s CIA job by a senior administration official in mid June 2003.

According to Woodward, that triggered a call to his source. "I said it was clear to me that the source had told me in mid-June," says Woodward, "and this person could check his or her records and see that it was mid-June. My source said he or she had no alternative but to go to the prosecutor. I said, 'If you do, am I released?'", referring to the confidentiality agreement between the two. The source said yes, but only for purposes of discussing it with Fitzgerald, not for publication.

Woodward said he had tried twice before, once in 2004 and once earlier this year, to persuade the source to remove the confidentiality restriction, but with no success.


http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1132544,00.html

[Spazito]

1. Riiiiight, sure ya did, Ms. Judy Woodward

(credit to billmon)

If anyone believes this, have I got a bridge for sale just for you, lol.

[robbedvoter]

2. To the bad bad prosecutor twarting the 1st Amendment? Nawww!

That would be wrong, non?
Woody has been on so many sides of this story, anything he says now sounds insane (and untrue).

[Teaser]

3. Mr. All-Important Saves the Day again.

I hate Mr. All-Important. It was nice, in the 70s, when he actually did a job other than sitting his fat ass around the offices of the WaPo all day long.

[Stephanie]

4. What the hell? "I learned something more"

What could that mean? Woodward learned something more which caused the source to say, oh wow, I guess I should tell Fitzgerald? What could it be???

[tularetom]

5. Maybe woodward made the whole thing up

Sitting there and watching miller get all the publicity for being a n insider whore, when he's worked so hard to achieve that status over so many years. Can you imagine a story of this magnitude going on right there in Wahsington without bob woodward being part of it? If anybody sat and thought about that they might think bob wasn't the insider he so loves being. What then? No more asskissing fests with Larry King no more adulation from pumpkin head russert and big doughy matthews. Bob couldn't have that. So he invents a mysterious "source" who cannot be identified. (Kinda like his "deathbed confession" from Bob Casey back in the Iran Contra days).

[geek tragedy]

6. He was trying to protect the administration.

The man's not a journalist, he's a GOP stenographer.