The Case of the Phony Memos

LISTEN TO DNC and Kerry campaign officials talk about the CBS memo scandal, and you might start to think that they protest too much. Just read the email Howard Wolfson sent to the press corps the other day. Wolfson is a political consultant, a former spokesman for Hillary Clinton, and a senior adviser at the Democratic National Committee. He's in charge of Operation Fortunate Son, the DNC political outfit meant to attack President Bush's service in the National Guard, but he wants you to know he is shocked--shocked--to find that the memos Dan Rather said came from the personal files of Lt. Col. Jerry Killian are actually forgeries.

The Democrats' rap on George W. Bush's service in the Texas Air National Guard runs roughly as follows: Political pressure must have helped Bush enlist in the Guard in 1968. There are gaps in his service record, notably some months in 1972-1973 when Bush was working on a political campaign in Alabama. There are missed medical exams and flight groundings, and some documents have never been found. The questions haven't been answered to the satisfaction of the president's critics--any more than the charges have been proved. And all this may be beside the point; Bush's activities from 1968 to 1973 have had no impact on voters' opinions of him. Yet.

Wolfson's job is to make Bush's Guard years matter. But, again, make no mistake: He wasn't involved with the forged memos. "Republican allegations of a 'Vast Left Wing Conspiracy' designed to expose the truth about the President's military service are laughable," he writes in his email. "No conspiracy is necessary to make clear that the President used strings to get into the Guard, missed his required physical, and failed to fulfill his duty." Is it even worth asking how the forgeries came to CBS? Nope. "The only outstanding questions here," he continues, "will be answered when the President steps forward, stops hiding behind spokespeople, and comes clean with the American people about his service."

Joe Lockhart agrees. Lockhart is the former Clinton spokesman who now serves John Kerry as a senior adviser. Shortly before 60 Minutes aired its now infamous report on September 8, CBS producer Mary Mapes arranged for Lockhart to have a conversation with Bill Burkett, the retired National Guard officer who gave CBS the forged documents. "It's baseless to say the Kerry campaign had anything to do with this," Lockhart told the Associated Press last week. Besides, USA Today reported, the documents "never came up in his conversation," which "lasted just a few minutes." However, theoretically, the documents could have come up before he talked to Burkett. "It's possible that the producer"--he means Mary Mapes--"said they had documents," Lockhart said. In any case, the conversation wasn't important, he said, because he speaks "to a lot of people." And the conversation was so meaningless, in fact, that once it was over, he told Kerry campaign manager Mary Beth Cahill about it, and she, in turn, told John Kerry, who, the New York Times reported, "did not think anything needed to be done in response."

And here is Terry McAuliffe, the chairman of the Democratic National Committee, on the forgeries: "I'd ask Karl Rove if he has any knowledge of these documents or if he or anyone close to him had seen the documents ahead of time," he told reporters on September 10, two days after the 60 Minutes piece aired. Last week, McAuliffe had a new suspect: sometime GOP consultant Roger Stone. Stone "refused to deny that he was the source of the CBS documents," McAuliffe said in a press release. "Will Ed Gillespie or the White House admit today what they know about Mr. Stone's relationship with these forged documents?"