Woodward and Libby

The Washington Post speculates today that Bob Woodward's testimony to the grand jury would be a boon to his defense case because it shows that there was another "senior administration official" leaking Valerie Wilson's identity to reporters and therefore Libby was not 'obsessed' with instrumenting retribution for Joe Wilson's Op-Ed in the New York Times where he laid out a strong case that there was no attempt by Iraq to buy yellowcake uranium from Niger, which discredited the Administration's claim of exactly that link in the run-up to the war. However, I don't think that Woodward's testimony does anything to benefit Libby. In fact, it may do more harm to the White House. It doesn't have any bearing on the charges against Libby of perjury, false statements and obstruction of justice. The only congruence with the indictment is Fitzgerald's statement that Libby was the first official known to have passed Valerie Wilson's identity to a reporter. Woodward's testimony expands the conspiracy (in the legalistic sense, not the grassy knoll sense) within the Administration to discredit one of the most respected citics of the war. Woodward cannot reveal who his source is or the details of the conversation publicly, but he has said it was not Libby, Rove or Andy Card, Bush's chief of staff. This leaves a few people who would have known of Wilson's identity, Colin Powell, Condoleeza Rice, Stephen Hadley, Douglas Feith and Dick Cheney. Since Woodward was conversing with sources to get information for his book Plan of Attack, it was likely someone involved in the war planning (most likely excluding Powell and possibly Rice). I think the highest likelihood is that, like with Libby, Cheney was the original source of Wilson's identity, but he deputized the release to insulate himself from wrongdoing. In my opinion, Woodward probably received the information about Wilson's identity from either Douglas Feith or Stephen Hadley.