For many years, the Washington Post’s Bob Woodward has breathed rarified air among the media elite. (Bringing down a president will do that to a reporter’s stature.) But, on occasion, that air gets a little thin and Woodward gets confused.
Over the weekend, Woodward appeared on the Chris Matthews Show when the issue of the Plame Game scandal came up. Woodward, who’s been hesitant to criticize the Bush White House’s role in the controversy in other recent interviews, actually carried water for the GOP by saying that the Rove-orchestrated smear against Joseph Wilson was justified because “there were reasonable grounds to discredit Wilson.” (C&L, of course, has the video.)
“I mean, here is the problem with this. We talk about — these words get thrown around: the effort to ‘trash’ Joe Wilson, a ‘campaign.’ I kind of like [New York Times reporter] Elisabeth’s [Bumiller] word: to ‘discredit’ him. And there were reasonable grounds to discredit Wilson. In other words, he had said something in his reports a year before that contradicted what he wrote in an op-ed piece in The New York Times.”
There are two points to consider here, the substantive claim and the broader political point.
First, as far as Woodward is concerned, Wilson’s famous NYT op-ed was in direct conflict with what he told the CIA about his findings in Niger. As Media Matters explained, Woodward is wrong.
Wilson’s report, however, conforms to his Times op-ed. The report itself is classified, though its contents are described in the 2004 Senate Intelligence Committee’s “Report on the U.S. Intelligence Community’s Pre-War Intelligence Assessments on Iraq.”
In his op-ed, Wilson wrote of the reported sale of Nigerian yellowcake uranium to Iraq that “[i]t did not take long to conclude that it was highly doubtful that any such transaction had ever taken place.”
What Wilson wrote in the Times is the same thing he told intelligence officials. What’s more, he was right about Niger, uranium, and Iraq, while those who attacked him were wrong.
Putting that aside, however, we see a more troubling aspect to Woodward’s comments.
Let’s say Woodward was right about Wilson. He’s not, but let’s just forget that for a moment. If Wilson’s op-ed has some inconsistencies with his Niger findings, Woodward told a national television audience, the White House was justified in launching an aggressive campaign against him. Indeed, to hear Woodward tell it, there were “reasonable grounds” for the smear in the first place.
Consider the meaning behind Woodward’s claim here. The assistant managing editor of the Washington Post, the Pulitzer-Prize winning reporter behind Watergate, was excusing a smear job that led White House staffers to leak classified information in order to cover up their lies about Iraq.
Has Woodward slipped that far from credibility? Or is he just confused about the facts of this controversy?