RatherBiased [1] reports Bill Burkett… you remember him… the guy who gave CBS the fake documents in the first place… is now feeling like nobody likes him, and blames CBS. He’s denying he knew they were fake, and says, essentially, that CBS didn’t bother to check them.
“As I openly stated, backgrounded in excruciating detail to Mapes, Rather and CBS, the documents had to be able to be ‘free standing’ before I would release them. I had to be satisfied that CBS had the capability and intent to fully authenticate the documents,” Burkett wrote in the letter, a copy of which was obtained by the ezine Salon.com. “CBS, through its employees, had to make a critical decision as to whether they were willing to take that risk. There were no expressed or implied warranties about the documents. Yet I believed them to be authentic.”
Even assuming Bukett dind’t know what he was offering CBS was fake…. even assuming, more correctly, that Burkett didn’t type the fakes himself, there is still the question of why Burkett would have chosen CBS to sprng these fakes in the first place. The answer to that seems fairly easy to come to; Burkett figured of all the news services, CBS would be the easiest news org to get such documents to air. Burkett, along with the rest of America, recognized that CBS was willing to go to great lengths to throw the election into the hands of John Kerry. when Burkett’s documents showed up, they must have seemed the answer to what passes in liberal circles as a prayer. Rather than look this gift horse in the mouth by investigating it, they went with it, without question. They did so because it fit their own politics.
And in fact, RatherBiased goes on to point out that Burkett and CBS had worked together before to cough up other anti-Bush stories.
Of course, investigation of those false stories now seems to have been overtaken by Jeff Gannon’s tale. We can’t seem to bring the MSM to really investigate CBS’s misdeeds. Rather, they seem intesreted in bringing their full investigative weight to someone who clearly was not a liberal lockstepper, and certainly one who was not in the ‘club’.
But this story will force the issue… I cannot imagine that there will not be subpoenas issued on this case. It’ll be interesting to hear the dancing in open court.