Woodward’s “confession” was just a lucky break

Howie Kurtz says that if Washington Post Executive Editor Len Downie hadn’t asked Bob Woodward to stop writing a book long enough to do a newspaper story on Plamegate, we still might not know that some White House insider had been leaking to him.

In fact, it was when Downie asked Woodward to work on the CIA leak case last month that the reporter acknowledged that a senior administration official had told him in 2003 that Valerie Plame, the wife of White House critic Joseph Wilson, worked for the CIA.

So, Downie is hoist by his own petard for letting Woody run around without a leash. No wonder (among other things Kurtz details) not everybody at the Post is in his corner.

And, here’s the $64 question: How long would Woodward have sat on the fact that he had received Plamegate leaks if Downie hadn’t asked him to do a newspaper story? Would Woody be popping up, so to speak, during Libby pretrial motions? During the start of his trial, if it goes there?