Woodward Has a New Deep Throat

If you haven't been following the Valerie Plame/Joe Wilson/CIA false "outing" story, skip this posting. Reading it would be like trying to follow an episode of a daytime soap when you don't know all the convoluted connections among a cast of complicated characters.

Anyway.

Bob Woodward of the Washington Post testified before the Special Prosecutor Monday that he had engaged in conversation with a "senior administration official" who was NOT Scooter Libby about "Joe Wilson's wife" two weeks before Bob Novak's article about Valerie Plame was published. This would make Woodward the first reporter to have heard about the CIA employee in relation to this story. It would also make Scooter Libby NOT the first administration official to have talked about Valerie Plame to a reporter.

Woodward says he did talk with fellow Post reporter Walter Pincus about the CIA wife/employee. Pincus denies any such conversation took place.

All this new information complicates the case against Scooter Libby and raises more questions about who the "senior administration official" could be.

It also puts Bob Woodward back in the limelight, and one must wonder about the revelation and the timing of it.

Woodward says that he didn't reveal this information earlier because he was writing a book and didn't want to be distracted by a pesky subpoena to testify. He also didn't want to risk going to jail for refusing to reveal his source, as Judith Miller did, even though he could have done a lot of writing without distraction in jail.

Woodward didn't even tell his editor about the alleged conversation until recently.

It sounds too convenient. But what do we know...