Bob Woodward just can’t resist the urge to play hardball with Washington’s powerbrokers. Now he’s caused a stir in the “Plamegate” debacle. Reads a Washington Post story today “Woodward Could Be a Boon to Libby:”

The revelation that The Washington Post’s Bob Woodward may have been the first reporter to learn about CIA operative Valerie Plame could provide a boost to the only person indicted in the leak case: I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby.

Legal experts said Woodward provided two pieces of new information that cast at least a shadow of doubt on the public case against Libby, Vice President Cheney’s former chief of staff, who has been indicted on perjury and obstruction of justice charges.

Woodward testified Monday that contrary to Special Counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald’s public statements, a senior government official — not Libby — was the first Bush administration official to tell a reporter about Plame and her role at the CIA. Woodward also said that Libby never mentioned Plame in conversations they had on June 23 and June 27, 2003, about the Iraq war, a time when the indictment alleges Libby was eagerly passing information about Plame to reporters and colleagues.

While neither statement appears to factually change Fitzgerald’s contention that Libby lied and impeded the leak investigation, the Libby legal team plans to use Woodward’s testimony to try to show that Libby was not obsessed with unmasking Plame and to raise questions about the prosecutor’s full understanding of events. Until now, few outside of Libby’s legal team have challenged the facts and chronology of Fitzgerald’s case.

Fitzgerald spent two years on the investigation, and must be a bit surprised at Woodward’s revelations.

This new variable will throw the radical Left into further turmoil. Woodward is one of their heroes, and remember that Fitzgerald deflated their expectations by explicitly and categorically stating:

This indictment is not about the war. This indictment’s not about the propriety of the war, and people who believe furthering the war effort, people who oppose it, people who are — have mixed feelings about it should not look to this indictment for any resolution of how they feel or any vindication of how they feel. The indictment will not seek to prove that the war was justified or unjustified. This is stripped of that debate, and this is focused on a narrow transaction and I think anyone who’s concerned about the war and has feelings for or against shouldn’t look to this process for any answers or resolution of that.

Now I certainly don’t begrudge Woodward for bringing down the paranoid Nignew administration, but that was long ago. One has to question what’s going on in Woodward’s head now. He lost legitimacy with me when he falsely charged that President Bush and the Saudis had a secret “deal” to keep oil prices low in the run-up to the 2004 presidential election.

Plamegate does expose a certain hypocrisy in America’s media. On the one hand, many reporters were eager to learn the source of the supposed White House leak — to fuel their mission to bring down the fascist Bush. But what does this do to the tradition of keeping a story’s sources secret? On the other hand, many certainly wouldn’t want to shut down government leaks, an awesome source for news stories. The Fitzgerald investigation will certainly cause lawmakers to think very carefully before stepping forward as “anonymous sources.”

Just look at Judith Miller, who originally broke the Plame leak story, served jail time, and eventually revealed her source. This is what she now thinks of her long-time employer, the New York Times:

[Miller] described herself as a “free woman,” no longer bound to what she called the “convent of The New York Times, a convent with its own theology and its own catechism.”