Bob Woodward has done it again.
America's most famous journalist was beginning to sound like an old fogey, dismissing the significance of the CIA leak investigation in terms strangely reminiscent of those that the old fogeys of his day used to dismiss Watergate as a "second-rate burglary." And then it turns out he knew everything all along – indeed, that he was the first journalist to know. If it were funny, the joke would be on us.
There was Matt Cooper of Time barely escaping jail, and his bosses taking heat in Woodward's paper and elsewhere for turning over his notebooks – and Woodward didn't even tell his bosses what he knew because he didn't want to be subpoenaed. As if Matt did.
There was Judy Miller living on jail food, only to get out and lose her job, and Woodward knew everything first, and cozily sat on television opining about it, while his colleagues ran around crowing about how they were doing a better job covering the story than Judy's paper. Well, not exactly. Joke's on them, too.
But what in the world was he thinking when he said this to Larry King, on the day before Scooter Libby was indicted? "When the story comes out, I'm quite confident we're going to find that it started kind of as gossip, as chatter. I don't see an underlying crime here, and the absence of an underlying crime may cause somebody who is a really thoughtful prosecutor to say, you know, maybe this is not one to go to court with."
Was he protecting himself, or his source?
Where is the ace investigative reporter when we need one?
Asked to explain these statements, Woodward attributed them to "pent-up frustration, because I knew about this. As I said in the statement, the source said it in a very offhand, casual way."
Lewis (Scooter) Libby's defense had been along the same lines. He told the grand jury that it was common knowledge among reporters that Valerie Plame Wilson, the wife of a then-increasingly prominent critic of the Bush war, worked as an analyst for the CIA, and that he was told about it by Tim Russert – and not by his boss, Dick Cheney, as the indictment alleges.
Woodward's account doesn't technically contradict the perjury and false statement charges against Libby. Adding Woodward – and his source – hardly makes something common knowledge. However offhand the reference, Woodward, the world's expert on secrets, knew after the fact that this was one, which was why he told no one what he knew. Or will Libby now claim that he meant to say it was Woodward who told him, rather than Russert?
It was the genius of the Bush administration to embed American reporters with the troops during the invasion of Iraq, thus making them insiders in the war, rather than the outsiders that might have made them less enthusiastic supporters of the American effort.
Coupled with the flawed intelligence that was sold to Congress and the press, the result was that we went to war without the benefit of the checks and balances that come from an independent press. But that's really nothing new in modern Washington.
I remember when Bill Clinton and his team discovered, to their horror, that the Woodwards and Russerts of Washington were more powerful than they were, that the media mavens were the real big-shots in Washington, the highest earners, in the most secure seats, more insider than any senior administration official or member of Congress.
Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein were anything but that when, as police reporters investigating a burglary, they uncovered the tangled web leading from Watergate to the White House. In those days, they wouldn't dismiss a lead to one of the biggest stories of the decade because it came in the form of casual comment, made in an offhand way by a senior administration official. But they were just reporters then.
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