(UPDATE at end of this post)

If true, Politico’s story is obviously bad news for fellow Rostrafarian Kurt Bardella.

Here’s the first three grafs:

Rep. Darrell Issa, the Republican chairman of the powerful Oversight and Government Reform Committee, has launched an inquiry into whether spokesman Kurt Bardella improperly shared e-mails from other reporters with a New York Times reporter writing a book on Washington’s political culture, POLITICO has learned.

Bardella has been cooperating extensively with the Times’s Mark Leibovich on the book, and Issa told POLITICO Monday that he would “get to the bottom” of exactly what Bardella shared with Leibovich.

Aides close to the office say Bardella’s job hangs in the balance of the internal probe.

Read the entire Politico story for more details.

I’ve got some doubts about this story — note the telltale phrase about “aides close to the office.” Anonymous sources, in other words.That’s poor journalism, because we can’t judge the credibility of anonymous sources.

Also, Politico is involved in the story it’s covering. From the story:

POLITICO Editor-in-Chief John F. Harris raised concerns about the allegations in a letter Sunday to Issa.

“The practice of sharing reporter e-mails with another journalist on a clandestine basis would be egregiously unprofessional under any circumstances,” Harris wrote. “As the editor-in-chief of POLITICO, my concern is heightened by information suggesting that POLITICO journalists may have had their reporting compromised by this activity.”

So the Politico story might be either a disturbing revelation about cloak-and-dagger activity by Bardella, or simple professional envy and paranoia.

UPDATE: Politico isn’t getting much sympathy from Slate’s Jack Shafer. The insightful and incisive reporter says the world of political journalism revolves around such operations. Shafer said he coughed up a lung laughing at the indignation of Politico editor John F. Harris:

Although I would be first to offer condolences to any reporter whose e-mails or inquiries to a press officers had been blithely shared with another reporter, I wouldn’t spend more than five seconds on cheering him up. A certain variety of Washington reporter lives and dies by leaks from government officials, so I don’t see why a government official leaking to a reporter about a national security matter is kosher, but a government official leaking about what reporters are asking him about is “egregiously unprofessional,” “compromising,” or “intolerable,” as Harris puts it. . . .

Has Harris ever asked a press spokesman or other official source if another reporter was nosing around the story he was working on? Of course he has! Knowing what your competition is up to so that you can beat them into print is big part of a reporter’s job. Harris knows full well that many press spokesmen routinely conduct their business in an “unprofessional” manner by sharing information with favored reporters about what less-favored reporters are working on.

Best of all is the subhed for Shafer’s article:

John F. Harris, go soak your head.

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DISCLAIMER: This is my opinion, and not necessarily that of my employer, the North County Times.