As Big Head DC reported Friday, WaPo’s ombudsman, Deborah Howell, was expected to publish a piece today regarding a recent controversial outlook article penned by partisan lawyer Victoria Toensing, which was published just before the Scooter Libby jurors went into deliberation.

And she did — but some people we’ve spoken to today are surprised that she didn’t come down harder on Post editors. Some liberal bloggers and columnists have said that the piece amounted to jury tampering, since it contained “parsed interpretations of the law” as related to the Libby case, but Howell argues that it was not. “This wasn’t tampering,” she wrote today. “The judge has instructed jurors to stay away from news reports.”

She does note one piece of the story that she feels should have been mentioned:

While Toensing is a partisan, she also filed a friend-of-the-court brief during the leak investigation with media lawyer Bruce W. Sanford on behalf of 36 news organizations, including The Post. She and Sanford, who also worked on the 1982 law, argued that journalists shouldn’t have to testify because no crime was committed if Plame wasn’t a covert operative. Editors should have mentioned the court filing in the Outlook piece.

While there’s no way to know yet whether the Toensing piece influenced jurors, one thing’s for sure (at least from the e-mails we’ve received today): Many are questioning Howell’s ability to fairly evaluate WaPo journalism.