So the news is

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So the news is out from the Post now — both in a statement from Bob Woodward and in an article from the Post.

The details still seem sketchy and I suspect we’re going to find out a lot more in the next few days. But it now seems that Woodward — who has long been publicly critical of the Fitzgerald investigation — has been part of it from the beginning. Literally, the beginning.

From the Post account it appears that Woodward was told of Valerie Plame’s identity before any other journalist by an as-yet-unnamed senior administration official who is not Karl Rove or Scooter Libby.

More problematically for Woodward, he didn’t tell his own Post editors about any of this until last month and then only after the unnamed senior administration official came forward to Fitzgerald and told him about it. That apparently led Fitzgerald to subpoena Woodward

Woodward claims that he told Post reporter Walter Pincus about it at the time. But Pincus says he has no recollection of such a conversation.

From the Post article …

Woodward’s statement said he testified: “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 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.”

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.

There’s quite a bit here — both as a media story and in the potential implications for the leak probe (Libby’s lawyers are already using this as a cudgel against Fitzgerald’s case, arguing that there are clearly key facts Fitzgerald did not know). And I’ll need some time to digest them. At a minimum, though, Woodward seems to have some explaining to do, at least for the fact that he became an aggressive commentator on the leak story without ever disclosing his own role in it, not even to his editors.

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