WASHINGTON – A Bush administration official’s belated admission in recent weeks that he told The Washington Post’s Bob Woodward in mid-June 2003 about covert CIA officer Valerie Plame raises new questions in the special counsel’s two-year leak investigation.
That admission ends two years of secrecy between source and reporter, and in the process raises concerns about Woodward’s role as a journalist, the special counsel’s probe and the perjury indictment of former White House aide Lewis Libby.
Attorneys for Libby called the revelation a “bombshell” for special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald’s case against their client, but attorneys familiar with the probe said it might not be enough to get Libby off.
Wednesday began with Woodward’s statement in The Washington Post that he had testified under oath about an unnamed official telling him in June 2003 about Plame. And it ended with Woodward apologizing to the Post’s top editor, Leonard Downie, for not telling him about it for two years.
Until now, Woodward had not been connected to the investigation into the leak of Plame’s identity, which her husband, Joseph Wilson, has said was a White House attempt to undercut his criticism of its pre-war Iraq intelligence on weapons of mass destruction.
But Woodward said in a statement published Wednesday that he had testified about parts of interviews with three current or former Bush officials that related to the outing of Plame.
He said Fitzgerald contacted him Nov. 3 after one of the officials notified Fitzgerald about telling Woodward that Wilson’s wife worked for the CIA as an analyst on weapons of mass destruction.
The timing of that interview, in mid-June 2003, would make the unnamed official the first to tell a reporter about Plame, not Libby, the vice president’s former chief of staff.
Ted Wells, one of Libby’s attorneys, said Woodward’s diclosure undercut Fitzgerald’s five-count indictment charging Libby with lying when he said he learned about Plame from reporters rather than the CIA, State Department and Vice President Dick Cheney.
Wells said the disclosure shows Fitzgerald’s statement at his Oct. 28 news conference that Libby was the first official to tell a reporter about Plame “was totally inaccurate.”
Floyd Abrams, who represents The New York Times in the leak case, said, “I don’t think it seems to have much effect on the core of the charge against Mr. Libby.”
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