No Comment... Yet

No confirmation from "Woodstein."

No denial from "Woodstein."

Not even a hint of an infamously Nixonian non-denial denial.

Deepthroat, on his deathbed, revealed his identity today.

W. Mark Felt is Deepthroat.

Ex-FBI official:
I'm 'Deep Throat'

But Watergate reporter
won't confirm, deny story

Updated: 3:31 p.m. ET May 31, 2005

A former FBI official claims he was "Deep Throat," the long-anonymous source who leaked secrets about President Nixon's Watergate cover-up to The Washington Post, Vanity Fair reported Tuesday.

W. Mark Felt, 91, who was second-in-command at the FBI in the early 1970s, kept the secret even from his family until 2002, when he confided to a friend that he had been Post reporter Bob Woodward's source, the magazine said.

"I'’m the guy they used to call Deep Throat," he told lawyer John D. O'Connor, the author of the Vanity Fair article, the magazine said in a news release.

Felt, who said he was "only doing his duty" and did not seek to bring down Nixon over the cover-up of a break-in at Democratic Party offices in the Watergate complex in Washington, D.C., was initially adamant about remaining silent on the subject. MSNBC

Hm. Wasn't that one of the guys pardoned by Reagan for overzealous (trans. warrant-less) search and seizure (trans. break-ins) against the Weather Underground?

Yep.

Statement on Granting Pardons to W. Mark Felt and Edward S. Miller

April 15, 1981

Pursuant to the grant of authority in article II, section 2 of the Constitution of the United States, I have granted full and unconditional pardons to W. Mark Felt and Edward S. Miller.

During their long careers, Mark Felt and Edward Miller served the Federal Bureau of Investigation and our nation with great distinction. To punish them further -- after 3 years of criminal prosecution proceedings -- would not serve the ends of justice.

Their convictions in the U.S. District Court, on appeal at the time I signed the pardons, grew out of their good-faith belief that their actions were necessary to preserve the security interests of our country. The record demonstrates that they acted not with criminal intent, but in the belief that they had grants of authority reaching to the highest levels of government.

America was at war in 1972, and Messrs. Felt and Miller followed procedures they believed essential to keep the Director of the FBI, the Attorney General, and the President of the United States advised of the activities of hostile foreign powers and their collaborators in this country. They have never denied their actions, but, in fact, came forward to acknowledge them publicly in order to relieve their subordinate agents from criminal actions.

Four years ago, thousands of draft evaders and others who violated the Selective Service laws were unconditionally pardoned by my predecessor. America was generous to those who refused to serve their country in the Vietnam war. We can be no less generous to two men who acted on high principle to bring an end to the terrorism that was threatening our nation.

And, of course, there was this a few weeks ago...

Why Did Bob Woodward Lunch With Mark Felt in 1999?

Was it to ask if he could unmask Deep Throat?

By Timothy Noah
Posted Thursday, May 2, 2002, at 7:29 PM PT

As Chatterbox noted yesterday, the best guess going about the identity of Deep Throat, Bob Woodward's crucial but anonymous Watergate informer, has long been W. Mark Felt, assistant director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. In his haste to write yesterday's item, Chatterbox failed to chase down a tip he'd received (apparently first published in the Globe tabloid) that Woodward actually had lunch with Felt within the last few years. Today's Washington Times explains (in its "Inside the Beltway" column) that this information comes from a new book by Ronald Kessler, The Bureau: The Secret History of the FBI, due to be published next week. Like James Mann, who published the definitive Deep Throat piece 10 years ago in the Atlantic, Kessler worked at the Post during Watergate (he left in 1985), though Chatterbox doesn't know whether Kessler, like Mann, will speak out of school about what Woodward told colleagues at the time. More at Slate.com...

I'm just glad it wasn't putrid Pat Buchanan.

Speaking of Putrid Pat, he's already started spewing the rightwing talking point: Deepthroat was a traitor, and no one should be proud of what he did.

Expect to hear this ad nauseum in the coming days. Remember, if everyone is talking about whether or not Mark Felt is really Deepthroat or whether or not Mark Felt is a traitor, the real issues related to Tricky Dick (and the present day parallels) will disappear down the memory hole.

As for the "Woodstein would confirm this if it were true" crap...

When you promise not to reveal a source until after his death, you keep that promise. Period. Otherwise, your other sources will panic, and future sources will dry up. Woodward & Bernstein aren't complete idiots.

Nixon was a crook. His entire administration was crooked. Today's PNACers cut their crooked teeth on dirty tricks while working for the crook-in-chief.

They lied then, and they're lying today about their new & improved crooked actions. I will never forgive Gerald Ford (the only quasi-clean Republican they could find to pick up their mud-soaked standard and become its bearer) for pardoning Tricky Dick. Getting away with Watergate set the stage for Ronald Reagan's Alzheimers presidency, the second coming of Rumsfeld and Cheney, yet another failed Repeconomicecomonic policy and gargantuan national debt, the use of (and hiding behind) the Bornagainists, pre-emptive war, the hostile takeover of our news media, and the ascendance of George W. Moron.

Thanks, Gerry! Oh, by the way...

Your airport in Grand Rapids bites the big one. Do something about it before you die, OK?