Burkett Demanded and Received Quid Pro Quo: Documents for Access to Joe Lockhart
When I asked here if Bill Burkett received a quid pro quo from Mary Mapes I assumed we would never really know the answer. Boy was I wrong. According to USA Today,
Burkett told USA TODAY that he had agreed to turn over the documents to CBS if the network would help arrange a conversation with the Kerry campaign.
“At Burkett’s request, we gave his (telephone) number to the campaign,” said Betsy West, senior CBS News vice president.
CBS would not discuss the propriety of the network serving as a conduit between its partisan source, Burkett, and the Kerry campaign. “It was not part of any deal” with Burkett to obtain the documents, West said, declining to elaborate.
But Burkett said Monday that his contact with Lockhart was indeed part of an “understanding” with CBS. Burkett said his interest in contacting the campaign was to offer advice in responding to Republican criticisms about Kerry’s Vietnam service. It had nothing to do with the documents, he said.
Hmmm…maybe someone should tell West that Burkett is an “unimpeachable source” opposed only by right wing political operatives. This is turning into a conservative wet dream — CBS acting as a conduit hooking up anti-Bush activists with the Kerry campaign in exchange for fake documents designed to impugn the president and influence the upcoming election. I can’t wait for the TV movie about this, presumably on Fox.
The bigger problem for the Kerry campaign is that they’re slowly but surely getting drawn into the scandal. Lockhart claims that he talked to Burkett for only a few minutes and not about any documents. But National Review notes some strangely convenient timing — CBS’ story runs on September 8, and on September 9 the DNC unveils its “Fortunate Son” campaign attacking Bush’s National Guard service. That campaign, coincidentally, is centered around the very documents that Lockhart says he never discussed with Burkett,
The CBS story based on the memos the evening of Sept. 8. Are we to believe that the Democratic National Committee put together “Operation Fortunate Son,” in which these memos are front and center, entirely in the hours after the CBS report, and yet had their campaign ready so that these memos are referred to in the first words of the AP story Sept. 9?
Are we to believe that the DNC didn’t know ahead of time what was in those memos, and how they could be used to attack the president?
Ladies and gentlemen, I am not a lawyer. Would this qualify as circumstantial evidence that CBS and the DNC were collaborating on using the memos before the story ran?
As Glenn Reynolds puts it, “Shouldn’t CBS just register as a 527 and have done with it?”
Indeed.
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Sep 20th, 2004
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