Woodward is Disgraced

Martin Longman

19 years ago

Woodward and Bernstein were heroes of mine as soon as I saw All the President’s Men. I was probably ten years old when I first saw the movie. It made a permanent impression on me and, looking back, it informed my whole moral universe. The President is not above the law, he can’t ignore the courts, and he serves at Congress’s pleasure.

Nixon was brought down by two dogged reporters (and the editors that backed them) who were unafraid of pressure and threats. At least, that is how my ten year old brain interpreted the movie. And now my boyhood hero’s image lays in tatters. You might as well tell me that Don Mattingly used steroids.

Bob Woodward is a BushCo. shill and a liar.

This is going to be another Plame diary, and we will have to delve back into the timeline. Bob Woodward (.pdf) has been revealed as the first reporter known to have learned about Valerie Wilson’s employment at the CIA. I will excerpt some relevant passages from Woodward’s statement. We will look at what he says, what he does not say, and what it means for the Plame investigation:

On Monday, November 14, I testified under oath in a sworn deposition to Special Counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald for more than two hours about small portions of interviews I conducted with three current or former Bush administration officials that relate to the investigation of the public disclosure of the identity of undercover CIA officer Valerie Plame.

…I was first contacted by Fitzgerald’s office on Nov. 3 after one of these officials went to Fitzgerald to discuss an interview with me in mid-June 2003 during which the person told me Wilson’s wife worked for the CIA on weapons of mass destruction as a WMD analyst.

Fitzgerald asked for my impression about the context in which Mrs. Wilson was mentioned. I testified that the reference seemed to me to be casual and off-hand, and that it did not appear to me to be either classified or sensitive. I testified that according to my understanding an analyst in the CIA is not normally an undercover position.

I testified that after the mid-June 2003 interview, 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 does not recall that I passed this information on.

The first thing to note is the date of the interview. Woodward inexplicably refuses to divulge the exact date. He leaves it vague: ‘mid-June’. He goes on the discuss interviews he conducted on June 20th and June 23rd, but he can’t do us the favor of giving us a date for the interview where he learned about Wilson’s wife. That’s just a punk-ass omission. All we know is it was before the 20th, in something that would qualify as the middle of the month. So, let’s put this revelation in it’s proper context:

May 6

Nicholas Kristof in “Missing in Action: Truth” for the New York Times mentions Joseph Wilson‘s trip to Niger to investigate claims Iraq sought purchase of ‘yellowcake’ uranium (no names mentioned) and that the fabled 16 words in George W. Bush‘s 2003 State of the Union Address (SOTU) came from forged documents.

June 1-7

During the first week of June, Washington Post reporter Walter Pincus makes an inquiry about Joseph Wilson‘s trip, with the CIA public affairs office. That office contacts the Conterproliferation Division (CPD) at the CIA, (Valerie Plame‘s unit), but no report is produced. These events are later reported in Time magazines Sunday, Jul. 31, 2005 article, “When They Knew”

June 8

Then National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice appears on Meet the Press and attempts to refute Kristof’s claims in his early May article.

June 10

A classified State Department memorandum is drafted for Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs Marc Grossman (from Carl Ford‘s office) containing information about CIA officer Valerie Plame. She is named in the memo in a paragraph marked “(SNF)” for secret, non-foreign (i.e., not to be shared with foreign agencies, even allies). Plame — who is referred to by her married name, Valerie Wilson, in the memo — is mentioned in the second paragraph of the three-page document, which was written by an analyst in the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR).

June 12

Walter Pincus of the Washington Post writes “CIA Did Not Share Doubt on Iraq Data“, about Joseph Wilson‘s trip without naming the retired Ambassador. Pincus also reports that according to an administration official neither Dick Cheney or his staff learned of its role in spurring the mission until it was disclosed by New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof on May 6.

After the June 12 article by Pincus, “there was general discussion with the National Security Council and the White House and State Department and others” regarding Wilson and his trip, says a former intelligence officer. Source: Time Magazine, “When They Knew”

June 13

Kristof responds and sticks by his claim. Joseph Wilson is again not named in the article.

June 23

Judith Miller has a conversation with Scooter Libby pertinent to the Plame case; this conversation and the existence of notes pertaining to it are reported through a leak to the press on October 8th, 2005. New York Times article (may be subsciption only.)

[Some linked timeline items can be found at DKosopedia.com]

The second thing to note is Woodward’s claim that “after the mid-June 2003 interview, 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 does not recall that I passed this information on.” Here is Walter Pincus’s response:

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.”

No shit he would have remembered it. He had contacted the CIA during the first week of June, inquiring about Wilson’s trip. He wrote an article on the 12th that said:

Armed with information purportedly showing that Iraqi officials had been
seeking to buy uranium in Niger one or two years earlier, the CIA in early February 2002 dispatched a retired U.S. ambassador to the country
to investigate the claims…

I think Pincus would have remembered learning that Wilson’s wife worked at the CIA in “mid-June”. As for Woodward, he acted as though he had never learned it.

Woodward never mentioned this contact — which was at the center of a criminal investigation and a high-stakes First Amendment legal battle between the prosecutor and two news organizations — to his supervisors until last month. [Washington Post Executive Editor Leonard] Downie said in an interview yesterday that Woodward told him about the contact to alert him to a possible story. He declined to say whether he was upset that Woodward withheld the information from him.

Downie said he could not explain why Woodward said he provided a tip about Wilson’s wife to Walter Pincus, a Post reporter writing about the subject, but did not pursue the matter when the CIA leak investigation began.

That’s right. Woodward did not pursue the matter of the outing of Valerie Plame, even though he knew exactly who had leaked the information.

Let’s skip ahead to October of 2003. But first, let’s look at some of the events of September.

September 14

Joseph Wilson publishes “Seeking Honesty in U.S. policy” in The San Jose Mercury.

September 16

The CIA notifies the DOJ that its investigation is complete and recommends that the FBI undertake a full criminal investigation.

Scott McClellan at a White House press briefing, is asked “Now, this is apparently a federal offense, to burn the cover a CIA operative. . . . Did Karl Rove do it?” He replied, “I said, it’s totally ridiculous.”

September 23

The CIA submits a standard 11 part questionnaire used by the DOJ to determine whether an investigation is warranted. (Milbank and Schmidt, “Justice Department Launches Criminal Probe of Leak, Washington Post, Oct. 1, 2003 at A01).

September 26

John Dion, Director of the DOJ’s Counterespionage section decides to pursue a criminal investigation.

September 28

A source in the administration confirms that two senior administration officials contacted at least 6 reporters about the identity and occupation of Wilson’s wife. The Washington Post quotes a senior administration official saying “that before Novak’s column ran, two top White House officials called at least six Washington journalists and disclosed the identity and occupation of Wilson’s wife.” … “They [the leakers] alleged that Wilson, who was not a CIA employee, was selected for the Niger mission partly because his wife had recommended him.” (Wilson 385)

The source also claims that, “Clearly, it was meant purely and simply for revenge.” He stated that he was sharing the information because the disclosure was “wrong and a huge miscalculation, because they were irrelevant and did nothing to diminish Wilson’s credibility.” (Allen and Priest, “Bush Administration is Focus of Inquiry,” Washington Post, Sept. 28, 2003 at A01.)

George W. Bush‘s aides promise to cooperate with any DOJ inquiries, but admit that “Bush has no plans to ask his staff members whether they played a role” in the leak. (Allen, “Bush Aides Say They’ll Cooperate With Probe Into Intelligence Leak,” Washington Post, Sept. 29, 2003 at A01).

MSNBC announces that Justice Department has begun its investigation.

September 29

The DoJ notifies the CIA that the Counterespionage division has also requested an investigation.

The DoJ requests the FBI investigate the leak.

On CNN‘s Crossfire, Robert Novak explains, “Nobody in the Bush administration called me to leak this. In July I was interviewing a senior administration official on Ambassador Wilson’s report when he told me the trip was inspired by his wife, a CIA employee working on weapons of mass destruction. Another senior official told me the same thing. … They asked me not to use her name, but never indicated it would endanger her or anybody else. According to a confidential source at the CIA, Mrs. Wilson was an analyst, not a spy, not a covert operative, and not in charge of undercover operatives. So what is the fuss about, pure Bush-bashing?” (“Crossfire,” CNN, Sept. 29, 2003).
October 12
- Washington Post article by By Walter Pincus and Mike Allen entitled Probe Focuses on Month Before Leak to Reporters. FBI agents are asking questions about events going back to at least early June, the sources said.

[Some linked timeline items can be found at DKosopedia.com.]

In that October 12th piece, Pincus revealed something important:

On July 12, two days before Novak’s column, a Post reporter was told by an administration official that the White House had not paid attention to the former ambassador’s CIA-sponsored trip to Niger because it was set up as a boondoggle by his wife, an analyst with the agency working on weapons of mass destruction.

The ‘Post reporter’ was Pincus. Pincus later explained why he didn’t report the story:

On July 12, 2003, an administration official, who was talking to me confidentially about a matter involving alleged Iraqi nuclear activities, veered off the precise matter we were discussing and told me that the White House had not paid attention to former Ambassador Joseph Wilson’s CIA-sponsored February 2002 trip to Niger because it was set up as a boondoggle by his wife, an analyst with the agency working on weapons of mass destruction.

I didn’t write about that information at that time because I did not believe it true that she had arranged his Niger trip. But I did disclose it in an October 12, 2003 story in The Washington Post.

And it was in this time period that Pincus recalls Woodward first intimating that he might have known about Valerie Plame before Novak’s column.

Pincus said Woodward may be confused about the timing and the exact nature of the conversation. He said he remembers Woodward making a vague mention to him in October 2003. That month, Pincus had written a story explaining how an administration source had contacted him about Wilson. He recalled Woodward telling him that Pincus was not the only person who had been contacted.

That is a far cry from Woodward’s claim that “after the mid-June 2003 interview, 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.”

The bottom line is that I don’t believe Woodward ever told Pincus that he knew about Wilson’s wife. Not in June, and not in October. He withheld that information from his own supervisors. And he has been poo-pooing this investigation for years.

Woodward, who is preparing a third book on the Bush administration, has called Fitzgerald “a junkyard-dog prosecutor” who turns over every rock looking for evidence. The night before Fitzgerald announced Libby’s indictment, Woodward said he did not see evidence of criminal intent or of a major crime behind the leak.

“When the story comes out, I’m quite confident we’re going to find out that it started kind of as gossip, as chatter,” he told CNN’s Larry King.

Woodward also said in interviews this summer and fall that the damage done by Plame’s name being revealed in the media was “quite minimal.”

“When I think all of the facts come out in this case, it’s going to be laughable because the consequences are not that great,” he told National Public Radio this summer.

He also told Larry King:

They did a damage assessment within the CIA, looking at what this did that Joe Wilson’s wife was outed. And turned out it was quite minimal damage. They did not have to pull anyone out undercover abroad. They didn’t have to resettle anyone. There was no physical danger of any kind and there was just some embarrassment.

After watching this performance, our own Larry Johnson noted:

Great news Bob, except there was this other little headline in Saturday’s Washington Post:

CIA Yet to Assess Harm From Plame’s Exposure

So, either you had real news and didn’t share it with your reporters or you are just making this up? I personally suspect the latter. I have spoken to some people who are in a position to know. There has been damage. My source, however, declined to share classified information.

Let’s face it. It is a sickening sight when a man who got his start in Washington as a take no prisoners investigative journalist has decided to join the prisoners and excuse their conduct as they destroy national security assets and lie, bald face lie, to the American people. Heck of a job, Bobby!

A heck of a job indeed. Woodward has been spinning this story as much ado about nothing, all the while hiding the fact that he was the first reporter to be contacted about Wilson’s wife. And he testifies that:

Well, how could he testify otherwise, after insisting that the investigation was ‘laughable’?

Finally, you might want to know why this information is coming out now? I don’t really know. Libby’s lawyers are touting this revelation as exonerating, because it (allegedly) reveals that Scooter was not the first person to slip up and reveal classifed information to a reporter. But this information does nothing to exonerate Libby of making false statements and committing perjury. It’s a sideshow.

Meanwhile, Woodward is disgraced.

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