Washington – Bob Woodward apologized Wednesday to The Washington Post for failing to reveal for more than two years that a senior Bush administration official had told him about CIA operative Valerie Plame, even as an investigation into who disclosed her identity mushroomed into a national scandal.
Woodward, an assistant managing editor and best-selling author, said he told executive editor Leonard Downie that he held back the information because he was worried about being subpoenaed by Patrick Fitzgerald, the special counsel leading the investigation.
“I apologized because I should have told him about this much sooner,” said Woodward, who testified Monday in the CIA leak investigation. “I explained in detail that I was trying to protect my sources. That’s job No. 1 in a case like this. …
“I hunkered down. I’m in the habit of keeping secrets. I didn’t want anything out there that was going to get me subpoenaed.”
Downie, who was informed by Woodward late last month, said his most famous employee had “made a mistake.” Despite Woodward’s concerns about his confidential sources, Downie said, “he still should have come forward, which he now admits. We should have had that conversation.”
The belated revelation that Woodward has been sitting on information about the Plame controversy reignited questions about his unique relationship with The Post while he writes books with unparalleled access to high-level officials and about why Woodward denigrated the Fitzgerald probe in television and radio interviews while not divulging his own involvement.
“It just looks really bad,” said Eric Boehlert, a Rolling Stone contributing editor and author of a forthcoming book on the administration and the press. “It looks like what people have been saying about Bob Woodward for the past five years, that he’s become a stenographer for the Bush White House.”
Shortly after Woodward’s conversation with Downie in late October, a federal grand jury indicted Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, Lewis “Scooter” Libby, on charges of perjury and obstruction of justice in the Plame case. Woodward told Fitzgerald that he met with Libby on June 27, 2003, but that he does not recall discussing Plame or her husband, White House critic and former ambassador Joseph Wilson.
Fitzgerald has spent nearly two years investigating whether Bush officials illegally leaked Plame’s name to the media to discredit Wilson.
Woodward said Wednesday that he was “quite aggressively reporting” a story related to the Plame case when he told Downie about his involvement.
