Judy Miller is So Five Minutes Ago

The new irresponsible journalist? Our favorite old-time hero (played by Robert Redford in the movie) turned Republican operative Bob Woodward. There’s no sense writing my own nonsense when Talking Points Memo can do it so much better:

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.

The interesting parts to me are a) the not telling the editors what was going on. That just stinks of Judy Miller and in both cases speaks to a sense of entitlement from these two - “I’m above the rules.” And b) what sort of journalist runs around making comments about an investigation in which one is embroiled without revealing that you are part of that investigation? The latter applies to Mr. Tim Russert as well.

I think this thing’s still got legs, people.