WASHINGTON -- Allies of defeated presidential candidate Mitt Romney approached reporters with a government insider on the Benghazi, Libya, U.S. embassy attack in the final weeks of the campaign, Pulitzer Prize winning investigative journalist Bob Woodward told Fox News Wednesday night.
Woodward, appearing on the Sean Hannity show to discuss media coverage of Obama administration scandals, used the anecdote as an example of how he had tried to look into the story behind the Sept. 11 attack on an U.S. diplomatic outpost in Benghazi that left four Americans dead, including the ambassador.
"Some people close to Romney, a couple of weeks ago, just showed up at my house and said that they had somebody in a very sensitive position in the U.S. government who was willing to meet with me and give me information about Benghazi," Woodward told Hannity.
After the source failed to show at several meetings, Woodward said he finally met the person and was disappointed by the quality of the information.
"He finally showed up and he didn't have anything where he had any firsthand knowledge," Woodward said. "He said you ought to talk to his person and that person and so forth."
It was not clear from Woodward's remarks whether the people shopping the source in the first place were part of Romney's campaign, or were operating with the candidate's knowledge.
Woodward declined to elaborate when asked later by The Huffington Post. A Romney spokesman didn't immediately respond.
During the final stretch of the campaign, Romney went out of his way to avoid bringing up the controversy over Benghazi, even as the conservative media hammered President Barack Obama about what he knew and when.
Obama and other U.S. officials ultimately acknowledged the bombing was a "terrorist" attack carried out by militants with suspected links to al Qaeda affiliates or sympathizers. Administration spokesmen, citing an unclassified assessment prepared by the CIA, maintained for days that the attacks likely were a spontaneous protest against an anti-Muslim film.
Despite Woodward's story, Hannity pressed on about how much remains unknown about the Benghazi episode. Congress has plans to continue probing the attack when it returns to work next week.
"We don't know where the president was on the night of 9/11, when this happened," Hannity said. "We don't know what he knew."
Woodward agreed, but defended the way the press corps has handled the developing story.
"There are immense inconsistencies and unanswered questions," Woodward said. But he added, "You can't write if you don't have anything. But when I work on one of these projects or books it takes months and years to develop the sources and to get the documentation."
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