Testy Woody

by digby

Here’s an interesting account of a close encounter with Bob Woodward on November 6th (after Libby was indicted and before the Woodster testified) by a reporter with the Toronto Star:

Interestingly, on Sunday, Nov. 6, Woodward was in Toronto, giving a speech to major donors to the UJA. Before the gala dinner at the Royal York Hotel, he spoke to half a dozen reporters, including myself. Here’s my treeware column about it.

But I left stuff out.

You see, I had come loaded for bear, wondering why Woodward had been minimizing the Plame investigation in the previous week. So, while we were waiting for Woodward, who was more than half an hour late, I asked the other reporters if they had prepared ”a line of attack.” None of them had. It was a Sunday, a slow news day, there was no real news hook, and these were fairly young general assignment journos not particularly immersed in these matters. None of them protested against my wanting to dominate the non-news news conference.

So I pounced, firing off three questions at the top, asking about Libby and Plame and the scandal. Among the questions was, knowing what he knows now, would anything have changed in his book about the run-up to the Iraq invasion, Plan of Attack? He replied:

None of the facts that I know of I would change.

The indictment against Scooter Libby has to do with things he told the Grand Jury and the FBI in an investigation that took place really after all of the decision to go to war had been finalized, and I think after I had finished my book.

Not quite, since the book wasn’t published until 2004, some ten months after Woodward and his unnamed administration offical had that conversation about Plame, and nine months before the scandal broke.

Still Woodward continued:

How would I have known that Scooter Libby allegedly lied to the FBI?
There’s nothing in that if it was possible to know, you know, it doesn’t change anything.

I guess that, strictly speaking, that’s accurate — but there’s no doubt that Woodward knew that the White House was spinning like mad about members of the Bush administration not being ”knowingly” involved.

Anyway, Woodward bristled at my questions, and actually accused me of ”conducting an interrogation.” He pointedly asked the others if they had any questions. I politely backed off, only to return later to ask about how he felt about the recent blog attack regarding his brushing aside of the Plame case. He said he paid no attention to blogs. He cut off the Q&A and made a super-patronizing comment about us being happy little reporters. (No, I did not like him.)

He made these comments on November 6th. He says in his “statement” to the Wapo yesterday:

The interviews were mostly confidential background interviews for my 2004 book “Plan of Attack” about the leadup to the Iraq war, ongoing reporting for The Washington Post and research for a book on Bush’s second term to be published in 2006. The testimony was given under an agreement with Fitzgerald that he would only ask about specific matters directly relating to his investigation.

[…]

I was first contacted by Fitzgerald’s office on Nov. 3 after one of these officials went to Fitzgerald to discuss an interview with me in mid-June 2003 during which the person told me Wilson’s wife worked for the CIA on weapons of mass destruction as a WMD analyst.

You can understand why Woodward was so testy. He was three days into the realization that his reputation was about to be flushed down the toilet.

And he was being dishonest about the timeline. He knew very well he’d been interviewing the players for his book.

I continue to find it amusing that these journalists get so testy when they find themselves on the receiving end of hard questions. You’d think they, of all people, would know what to expect and know how to handle it. Of course, the WoodMill types are above all that. They just tell the stories their confidential sources give them. If their sources are wrong, what has that to dow with them?

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