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Bob Woodward is leaving the regular payroll of the Washington Post, along with about 100 other Posties who are accepting the paper’s generous early retirement package. For the Post’s legendary investigative reporter, however, the buyout may not exactly yield a windfall, largely because he has been drawing a salary of $10,000 for the past couple of years. The buyout gives the most senior Post staffers an exit payment of two times their final salary. On that basis, Woodward would get a check for $20,000, or enough for a 2008 Chrysler Sebring. He is 65 and started at the Post in...

By Bob Woodward Washington Post Staff Writer Monday, September 17, 2007; A03 Alan Greenspan, the former Federal Reserve chairman, said in an interview that the removal of Saddam Hussein had been "essential" to secure world oil supplies, a point he emphasized to the White House in private conversations before the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Greenspan, who was the country's top voice on monetary policy at the time Bush decided to go to war in Iraq, has refrained from extensive public comment on it until now, but he made the striking comment in a new memoir out today that "the Iraq...

<p>CAIRO, Egypt (AP) - Al-Qaida's No. 2 has issued a new video tape calling on Muslims to unite in jihad, or holy war, and support the Islamist movement in Iraq, a U.S.-based intelligence monitoring group said Wednesday.</p> <p>Ayman al-Zawahri is seen in the one-hour and 35 minutes tape dressed in white and addressing topics from Iraq to Saudi Arabia, the Palestinian territories and Egypt, said the U.S.-based SITE intelligence group, which monitors al-Qaida messages.</p>

NEW YORK Denis Collins, the juror in the Libby/CIA leak case who delivered a post-verdict commentary for the press, spent about a decade at The Washington Post. Today, after a night on cable TV shows, he re-appears with a massive recounting of his experience at the Huffington Post blog. His story is billed as "INSIDE THE JURY ROOM: WHAT THE JURY THOUGHT, DAY BY DAY, WITNESS BY WITNESS, AT THE SCOOTER LIBBY TRIAL" by Denis Collins, Juror #9. It calls it "unedited" impressions, memories and facts. Other jurors' names are changed. The New York Times today reports that he is...

WASHINGTON (AP) - Former White House press secretary Ari Fleischer leaked the identity of a CIA operative to Washington Post reporter Walter Pincus during a 2003 phone call, Pincus testified Monday as the first defense witness in the CIA leak trial. Pincus was one of the first reporters to learn the identity of Valerie Plame, the wife of former ambassador and prominent Iraq war critic Joseph Wilson. Pincus said he learned her identity July 12, 2003 but did not immediately write about it. Plame was outed by syndicated columnist Robert Novak two days later. Pincus testified on behalf of Vice...

Reporter Bob Woodward said today he would soon allow his Washington Post editors to publish a secret interview he did in 2005 with former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein in which the dictator questioned U.S. President George Bush’s rationale for invading Iraq. Mr. Woodward, who recently permitted his employer to publish a similar covert interview with the late former President Gerald Ford, said Mr. Hussein agreed to the no-holds-barred chat on the condition that the transcript be embargoed until after he “retired from public life,” which he did earlier today. “I have always thought that President Bush did the right thing...

You've got to hand it to Mortuary Bob. Nobody interviews the newly dead like he does. He doesn't always interview his subjects after they die. Sometimes, like the late Bill Casey, they're merely in a coma. John Belushi was somewhere between La-La Land and oblivion. Mortuary Bob's shovel is always showing up in unexpected places, and sometimes the mud on his boots leaves marks on the carpet. Nevertheless, he has grown sleek and rich dispensing nuggets -- little muddy clods, actually -- from the great beyond. He can coax usually inarticulate subjects to speak in whole sentences, arranged in neat...

Last lunch with a legend Speaks candidly about the WMDs and war in Iraq BY THOMAS M. DeFRANK DAILY NEWS WASHINGTON BUREAU CHIEF Thomas DeFrank, the Washington bureau chief for the Daily News, is seen in this 1996 photo talking to Gerald Ford. The men struck up a friendship that lasted three decades. Below, the two chat on Air Force One. Daily News Washington Bureau Chief Thomas M. DeFrank interviewed Gerald Ford more than three dozen times during the late President's retirement years. He saw Ford in November at his California home and spent more than two hours with him...

WASHINGTON -- Over the past several years, Bob Woodward has been secretly interviewing Gerald R. Ford for a book to be published after the former president's death. Woodward confirmed to NewsMax that he spent "many hours" interviewing Ford on condition that his comments appear after his death. In some cases, when Woodward interviewed key government figures for his latest book, "State of Denial," he asked about Ford as well. Ford died Tuesday at his home in Rancho Mirage, Calif., where Woodward conducted most of the interviews. Woodward said today that excerpts from his interviews with Ford will begin running in...

In all the many media interviews with Bob Woodward about his book, State of Denial, they were almost exclusively focused on the supposed mistakes of the Bush administration. The pundits almost unanimously concluded that Woodward's book would therefore be harmful to the Republicans going into this November's elections. However, overlooked by them is a section of the Woodward book that is now causing a firestorm in the Leftwing blogosphere against perhaps the most important Democrat political operative of them all, James Carville. M.J. Rosenberg in "The Coffeehouse" blog asks, "Did Carville Tip Bush Off to Kerry Strategy (Woodward)"? I...

by Mark Finkelstein October 6, 2006 - 21:36 In State of Denial, Bob Woodward claims Marine Gen. James L. Jones, the U.S. commander for Europe, said that the Iraq war is a "debacle" and that "the Joint Chiefs have been systematically emasculated by Rumsfeld." Two reporters from two publications followed up on the story. They couldn't have reached more diametrically opposed conclusions as to whether Woodward quoted Jones accurately. How's this for dueling headlines? "U.S. European Commander Confirms Quotes in Book" "NATO Chief Denies Quotes in Woodward Book" When it comes to contradictions, it doesn't get more stark and point-blank...

"HH: But my question is, is Woodwardism good for journalism, Tom Edsall? TE: I think that the problems Woodward poses as a journalist are significant. I think, though, that his contributions... HH: What are those problems. TE: ...have also been significant. It's a mixed bag. snip TE: One is what you sight, credibility. I think a much more serious problem is his dependence on sources, which makes him, to a certain extent, a sucker for those who talk to him, and a hostile adversary to those who do not talk to him." (snip) "TE: I think the problem is that...

Mortuary Bob is back, and that looks like fresh mud on his boots. Has he been hanging out at Memory Garden Acres again? A television interviewer yesterday accused Mortuary Bob Woodward, the most important reporter in town, of deliberately withholding publication of his new book, "State of Denial," with accusations of perfidy, lies and deceptions by George W. Bush, Condi Rice and Donald Rumsfeld, all to coordinate it with the November congressional elections.

EXCERPT from link:"In response to inquiries from CBS News over why Ashcroft was traveling exclusively by leased jet aircraft instead of commercial airlines, the Justice Department cited what it called a "threat assessment" by the FBI, and said Ashcroft has been advised to travel only by private jet for the remainder of his term."

Bush 'kept Blair in the dark over Iraq' by SHARON CHURCHER Last updated at 22:00pm on 30th September 2006 An explosive new book claims that Tony Blair pleaded in vain with George Bush to share vital combat intelligence about the Iraq war. The author, Watergate journalist Bob Woodward, paints a devastating portrait of Bush as an incompetent pawn of his chief advisers and the Pentagon's war planners. He says that, with Bush locked in a desperate battle to win re-election in 2004, they were more interested in hiding the truth about the failures to thwart the September 11 attacks and...

After two books that made President Bush look pretty good, Bob Woodward is out with a new one that comes awfully close to calling the president a liar. I can't imagine Woodward himself ever using the word -- it's much too shrill for the poster boy for the mainstream media. But is there any other way to describe what seems like the central theme of his new book, tartly titled "State of Denial"? Woodward is an assistant managing editor of The Washington Post, which is scheduled to run excerpts of the book in its Sunday and Monday editions. But the...

(CBS) Veteran Washington reporter Bob Woodward writes in his new book of fierce efforts inside the White House to get rid of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, a revelation that has caused a tremendous amount of concern at the White House. In Mike Wallace’s interview with Woodward, to be broadcast on 60 Minutes this Sunday, Oct. 1, at 7 p.m. ET/PT, the reporter also claims that Henry Kissinger is among those advising Mr. Bush. Woodward writes that several people inside the White House have pushed to oust Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. The ranks of those calling for Rumsfeld’s resignation included the...

In May, President Bush spoke in Chicago and gave a characteristically upbeat forecast: "Years from now, people will look back on the formation of a unity government in Iraq as a decisive moment in the story of liberty, a moment when freedom gained a firm foothold in the Middle East and the forces of terror began their long retreat." Two days later, the intelligence division of the Joint Chiefs of Staff circulated a secret intelligence assessment to the White House that contradicted the president's forecast. Instead of a "long retreat," the report predicted a more violent 2007: "Insurgents and terrorists...

New revelations that White House aides tried twice in the past two years to persuade President Bush to fire Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld fueled a caustic election-season debate yesterday over the president's wartime leadership and underscored divisions within his administration. The White House tried yesterday to dismiss the significance of Woodward's assertions, while Democrats eagerly seized on the book to bolster their campaign attacks five weeks before midterm elections. Coming days after the partial release of a National Intelligence Estimate concluding that the Iraq conflict has spread the "global jihadist movement," the latest disclosures kept the focus on the...

Is NBC News the publicity agency for CBS News? While Thursday's CBS Evening News had nothing on Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward's new book, for which he sat for an interview with Mike Wallace set to air on this Sunday's 60 Minutes, the NBC Nightly News led with the “explosive new book” about the Bush administration's “deception” on Iraq. NBC anchor Brian Williams hyped: “It alleges that attacks by insurgents on coalition forces in Iraq are worse than Americans have been led to believe. It also alleges a kind of campaign of deception on the part of the Bush administration.”...

WASHINGTON - The No. 2 State Department official met with Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward in mid-June 2003, the same time the reporter has testified that an administration official talked to him about CIA employee Valerie Plame. Official State Department calendars, provided to The Associated Press under the Freedom of Information Act, show then-Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage held a one-hour meeting marked “private appointment” with Woodward on June 13, 2003.

WASHINGTON — Then-Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage met with Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward in mid-June 2003, the same time the reporter has testified an administration official talked to him about CIA employee Valerie Plame. Mr. Armitage's official State Department calendars, provided to The Associated Press under the Freedom of Information Act, show a one-hour meeting marked “private appointment” with Mr. Woodward on June 13, 2003. Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald has investigated whether Bush administration officials intentionally revealed Ms. Plame's identity as a one-time CIA covert operative to punish her husband, former ambassador Joseph Wilson, for criticizing the administration's...

Calendars show Armitage met reporter By MATT APUZZO and JOHN SOLOMON, Associated Press Writers 11 minutes ago Then-Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage met with Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward in mid-June 2003, the same time the reporter has testified an administration official talked to him about CIA employee Valerie Plame. Armitage's official State Department calendars, provided to The Associated Press under the Freedom of Information Act, show a one-hour meeting marked "private appointment" with Woodward on June 13, 2003. Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald has investigated whether Bush administration officials intentionally revealed Plame's identity as a one-time CIA covert operative...

Left-wing nostalgia dies hard, but can it survive the events of this week? It has been a tough 10 days for those who see current events through the prisms of Vietnam and Watergate...[snip] Historians may regard it as a curious thing that the left and the press have been so determined to fit current events into templates based on events that occurred 30 to 40 years ago...[snip] Journalists in the 1940s, '50s and early '60s tended to believe they had a duty to buttress Americans' faith in their leaders and their government. Journalists since Vietnam and Watergate have tended to...

W. Mark Felt, who for nearly 33 years denied he was Deep Throat, also held a tragic secret from most of his family: It was suicide, not a heart attack, that felled his wife after years of strain from Felt's FBI career and ensuing legal troubles. In his new book, "A G-Man's Life: The FBI, Being 'Deep Throat' and the Struggle for Honor in Washington," Felt reveals for the first time that Audrey Robinson Felt, his wife of 46 years, shot herself in 1984 with his .38-caliber service revolver. The book, co-authored with John O'Connor, the lawyer whose Vanity Fair...

WASHINGTON - A snippet of a conversation between Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward and an unnamed source in mid-June 2003 appears to be a major focus of I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby's defense in the CIA leak case. According to a newly released transcript of last week's motions hearing in U.S. District Court, William Jeffress, one of Libby's attorneys, is focusing on three words — “Everyone knows it.”

Word out of the Defense Intelligence Agency and law enforcement sources has the FBI and the Department of Justice comparing notes and dates on who in the U.S. Senate received national security briefings on both the overseas terrorist prisons and the NSA overseas terrorist monitoring programs, and when those briefings took place. "The number of Senators who received briefings is not as large as people think," says one law enforcement source. "These were programs with a limited 'Need to Know" list on Capitol Hill." Federal investigators looking into the leaks of both those programs to the press are zeroing in...

Rockefeller Feeling the Heat? - Friday, February 24, 2006 @ 10:33:34 AM So Sen. Jay Rockefeller sent a letter to Amb. John Negroponte complaining about White House leaks to Bob Woodward. Why would Rockefeller be so uptight? Perhaps because he senses the FBI is locking in some of his loyalists in the NSA and overseas prison leaks? Things are going to be getting interesting for a number of folks on Capitol Hill in the coming days. Posted By: The Washington Prowler

Bob Woodward and photographer injured in IED attack.

WASHINGTON (AP) - Lawyers for a former top White House aide charged in the CIA leak investigation said Thursday the prosecutor should surrender a wide range of information about news organizations and their reporters, including The Washington Post's Bob Woodward. Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald has failed to disclose information that would enable the vice president's former chief of staff, I. Lewis ``Scooter'' Libby, to properly defend himself, his attorneys argued in papers filed with U.S. District Judge Reggie Walton.

WASHINGTON -- Lawyers for a former top aide to Vice President Dick Cheney told a federal judge Friday they want to subpoena journalists and news organizations for documents they may have related to the leak of a CIA operative's name. In a joint filing with prosecutors, lawyers for I. Lewis ''Scooter'' Libby, 55, warned U.S. District Judge Reggie B. Walton that a trial likely will be delayed because of their strategy to seek more subpoenas of reporters' notes and other records. Libby was indicted last year on charges that he lied to FBI agents and a federal grand jury about...

As reporters barraged the White House last week with renewed questions on the CIA leak case, one of the Washington press corps’ own may have been holding on to a key part of the mystery. Bob Woodward, the Washington Post’s distinguished reporter and associate managing editor, has already faced scrutiny for his role in the disclosure of Valerie Plame’s undercover status at the CIA. But in a conversation at Harvard earlier this month, Woodward hinted that he knows the identity of yet another key player in the case: Robert D. Novak’s original source for his July 2003 column on Plame,...

Woodwardgate: Deep Throat or Shallow Reporting?By Fedora One, Woodward wrote about how Deep Throat, he had a long friendship with Deep Throat. There's no evidence that he ever had any kind of friendship with Mark Felt. Secondly, why would the number two man at the FBI choose to confide in a young metro reporter for 'The Washington Post' who had only been there for nine months? Three, Deep Throat is given credit by Woodward with the story of the destruction of the tape. How would Mark Felt have known about that? On the other side of the coin, Mark Felt...

Bob Woodward is getting it from all sides. You've heard the uproar over the famed Watergate sleuth's taking two years to reveal that he was leaked the name of CIA agent Valerie Plame. Now the widow of John Belushi has recruited a gang of the late comic's friends to pay back Woodward for "Wired," his grim 1985 bio of her husband. After the "SNL" player OD'd, Judy Belushi Pisano encouraged all of his pals to talk to Woodward, who, like John, had grown up in Wheaton, Ill. She now tells us: "Woodward was the wrong guy [to write that book]....

WASHINGTON, Nov. 20 (UPI) -- Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice denied being Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward's source on the identity of Valerie Plane. Woodward acknowledged last week that he knew that Plame -- wife of former Ambassador Joseph Wilson -- was a CIA agent, days before New York Times reporter Judith Miller. I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby was forced to resign as Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff when he was indicted on an obstruction of justice charge stemming from a federal investigation into the leak. Rice, traveling in Asia with President George. W. Bush, issued her denial through...

Tough Week for The Post and a Star By Deborah Howell Sunday, November 20, 2005; B06 The Post took a hit to its credibility with readers last week when Bob Woodward revealed that he had been told about the identity of CIA analyst Valerie Plame more than two years ago but had kept it to himself for fear of being subpoenaed. Readers in droves wrote that they were angry and disappointed. That disappointment was rife in The Post's newsroom, too. Since Woodward and Carl Bernstein broke the Watergate story more than 30 years ago, they have been heroes to many....

THE mysterious source who gave America’s foremost journalist, Bob Woodward, a tip-off about the CIA agent at the centre of one of Washington’s biggest political storms was Stephen Hadley, the White House national security adviser, according to lawyers close to the investigation. Woodward, the Washington Post reporter who broke the Watergate scandal that forced President Richard Nixon out of office, has refused publicly to divulge the name of his informant without permission, which has thus far been withheld. A spokeswoman for the National Security Council (NSC) denied that Hadley was the journalist’s source. However, in South Korea on Friday during...

As reporters keep scrambling to find out who told Bob Woodward about Joe Wilson’s wife, Woodward himself has told TIME about a related mystery: what made the source finally come forward. When the Washington Post reporter went public with his involvement in the CIA leak case earlier this week, he failed to explain why his source waited silently for two years before coming clean to special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald. In an interview today, Woodward described the sequence of conversations with his source and Post executive editor Leonard Downie, Jr. that led to the latest twist in Fitzgerald’s investigation into the...

The whole Wilson-Plame-Libby case is much more of interest to political insiders and groupies than to most of us except for one thing – it was and is part of the essential hard-left Democrat strategy for the attempted impeachment of President Bush. Now, thankfully, with both the President and the Vice President fighting back on the other front, the ridiculous charge that Bush lied, the whole strategy seems to be going up in flames. I wrote a week ago that the Libby case was an abomination and only served to warn us never to give any information to an FBI...

It's all too much for Andy Mosher - he quotes Shakespeare, laments lack of privacy on public blogs, and then signs off - permanently.

What to think of the quite astonishing revelation that Bob Woodward was told by administration sources—not Scooter Libby or Karl Rove, it seems clear—that Joseph Wilson's wife worked at the CIA, and told a month before what Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald said was the first revelation by an administration source, Libby, to a member of the press? Here's the story from yesterday's Post on Woodward's testimony, and here's Woodward's statement, printed next to the story on the jump page. Here's the story by the Post's excellent media reporter Howard Kurtz on Woodward's apology to Post Executive Editor Leonard Downie for...

Bob Woodward 'fesses up to a grand juryabout Valerie Plame... (click here to see it reeeeeeeally large)

WASHINGTON (AP) - Bob Woodward's version of when and where he learned the identity of a CIA operative contradicts a special prosecutor's contention that Vice President Dick Cheney's top aide was the first to make the disclosure to reporters. Attorneys for the aide, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, described Wednesday's statement by the Washington Post's assistant managing editor as helpful for their defense, although Libby is charged with lying to a grand jury and the FBI, not with disclosing the CIA official's name. "Hopefully, as information is obtained from reporters like Bob Woodward, the real facts will come out," lawyer Ted...

This comes in the wake of the Woodward revelation that a former administration official discussed Plame/Flame with Bob Woodward before Libby ever spoke to a reporter. Also, that Woodward can not recall if he revealed the information to Libby. I am paraphrasing what I heard on tonight's John Batchelor Program during the 10:30 p.m. to 10:45 p.m. EST time slot on 770 WABC here in New York. Keep in mind that the last time I posted iformation from this program it was regarding John Fund saying Harriet Meirs Harriet Meirs nomination will be pulled. My post was two weeks before...

What did Bob Woodward know, and when did he know it? That's the first question that came to my mind as today's (Nov. 16) Page One story in the Washington Post, "Woodward Was Told of Plame More Than Two Years Ago," knocked me off my seat, spilling steaming hot coffee all down my Slate insignia bib. For the last two years, every reader and reporter in America has been adjusting his Valerie Plame timetable, trying to figure out who in the government leaked her name to whom and in what order. Meanwhile, Woodward was sitting mum in the catbird seat,...

Washington Post Assistant Managing Editor Bob Woodward testified under oath Monday in the CIA leak case that a senior administration official told him about CIA operative Valerie Plame and her position at the agency nearly a month before her identity was disclosed . . .

It is the ultimate Washington story, told by the ultimate Washington chronicler. But in Washington and just about everywhere else, sales of "The Secret Man," Bob Woodward's story of the source known as Deep Throat, have been underwhelming. At Politics and Prose, a well-known independent bookstore in Washington, sales were "not very good, compared to expectations," said Mark LaFramboise, who ordered 400 copies of the book for the store. As of last week, Politics and Prose had sold "60-something," he said. "I expected it to be a blockbuster," he said. "I was wrong." At Prairie Lights Books in Iowa City,...

...[N]ews organizations are trying to outwit a new generation of prosecutors and protect reporters and sources in what they believe to be an increasingly antagonistic environment. In some instances, news executives are issuing guidelines to educate and retrain their staffs about taking precautions to protect their notes and other source materials from being sought as evidence in legal cases. Some are also looking at technological fixes like heightened encryption and e-mail messages that expire after a period of time.... Several news organizations had already begun clamping down on the use of anonymous sources and tightening the rules for when they...

Mmmmmmm; the delicious taste of those well-remembered names: Nixon, Mitchell, Bradlee, Woodward and -- somehow more savory than most -- Deep Throat. The self-outing of W. Mark Felt, who confirmed the expectations of many by revealing himself as a main, early source for Bob Woodward's Watergate stories, came just in time for a country basically out of news; or weary of such news as it had -- filibusters, violence in Iraq, the start of the summer reruns. It was like old times, masticating those names again. And that was just the trouble -- the questionable odor that went with the...

I hope Mark Felt and his family get the big payoff they want, but they've already hurt their chances by ignoring his famous advice as Deep Throat. They didn't follow the money. They didn't appreciate how seriously we journalists take our ethical standards. We are bound by the sacred vow we make to our sources: if the information you give us turns out to be profitable, we will keep the money. Mr. Felt's family tried profiting from his revelation, but the news cartel held firm. People and Vanity Fair both rejected the family's overtures and held to their policy of...