Breaking out of London, the Sunday Times confirms Raw Story's
report of earlier this week that Bob Woodward's Plame source was none other than National Security Advisor
Stephen Hadley:
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.
It should be noted that the byline on the article is Michael Smith, the reporter who brought us the Downing Street Memo.
Hadley at the time of this conversation with Woodward was up to his eyeballs in the White House response to the Yellowcake SOTU fiasco, and it would therefore not be surprising if he was the pointperson on the Joe Wilson pushback. In light of this most recent revelation regarding his conversation with Woodward, he is now a prime suspect to be Novak's original Administration source for Plame, the mysterious "Mr. X," whose identity has been shrouded in mystery since the date Novak first published the now infamous column that started this whole investigation.
Of cource, there is no question that Hadley has testified previously before the Fitzgerald Grand Jury, and no question that he failed to disclose his conversation with Woodward at that time. Thus, along with Karl Rove, he faces the serious threat of a perjury indictment in the near future.