NYT: CBS News to crater on Rathergate — "Too flawed to have gone on the air"

It appears that when CBS News sent Dan Rather to interview Bill Burkett over the weekend, they sent along a grown-up with him — CBS News senior vice president Betsy West.  And the fairly direct result — under the headline "CBS News Concludes It Was Misled on National Guard Memos, Network Officials Say" — appears to be Monday's New York Times article by Jim Rutenberg (boldface added; hat-tip to Jim Geraghty's Kerry Spot on NRO):

After days of expressing confidence about the documents used in a "60 Minutes'' report that raised new questions about President Bush's National Guard service, CBS News officials have grave doubts about the authenticity of the material, network officials said last night.

The officials, who asked not to be identified, said CBS News would most likely make an announcement as early as today that it had been deceived about the documents' origins. CBS News has already begun intensive reporting on where they came from, and people at the network said it was now possible that officials would open an internal inquiry into how it moved forward with the report. Officials say they are now beginning to believe the report was too flawed to have gone on the air.

Apparently the weekend interview with Mr. Burkett was Dan Rather's last hope of salvaging his story, and perhaps his job; and apparently it failed utterly in at least the former respect, and perhaps in both:

[CBS News] officials decided yesterday that they would most likely have to declare that they had been misled about the records' origin after Mr. Rather and a top network executive, Betsy West, met in Texas with a man who was said to have helped the news division obtain the memos, a former Guard officer named Bill Burkett.

Mr. Rather interviewed Mr. Burkett on camera this weekend, and several people close to the reporting process said his answers to Mr. Rather's questions led officials to conclude that their initial confidence that the memos had come from Mr. Killian's own files was not warranted. These people indicated that Mr. Burkett had previously led the producer of the piece, Mary Mapes, to have the utmost confidence in the material.

It was unclear last night if Mr. Burkett had told Mr. Rather that he had been misled about the documents' provenance or that he had been the one who did the misleading.

Reading between the lines here:  Mr. Burkett claimed that before its demise, his dear departed dog ate the mailing envelope that his own "anonymous source" used to send the documents to Burkett, or some such equally implausible nonsense, but CBS News isn't ready yet to publicly label Burkett as the forger — and neither, to be fair, am I.  (And a small but not insignificant quibble — Mr. Burkett is a former Texas Army National Guard officer, not from the Texas Air National Guard, which of course was the branch of the Guard in which Dubya, Killian, Staudt, et al. served in.  When one sees this sort of distinction elude the NYT, one wonders if it also eluded CBS News, with serious consequences.)

But [the CBS News officials who spoke to the NYT] cautioned that CBS News could still pull back from an announcement. Officials met last night with Dan Rather, the anchor who presented the report, to go over the information it had collected about the documents one last time before making a final decision. Mr. Rather was not available for comment late last night.

Translation:  They haven't told Dan yet that he's going to be fired.  Perhaps they haven't decided yet.  Plus, having already picked their likely most sympathetic major media source (the NYT) to test the waters for them, they want to see what the early morning reaction is — whether their competitors will sheath the knives for now, or continue to slash and hack (pun on the word "hack" definitely intended).  There will be no backing off on the overall crater on the documents being forgeries.

More from renegade — i.e., truthful, to CBS News' acute embarrassment now that it can no longer ignore her — handwriting expert Emily J. Will:

Yesterday, Emily J. Will, a document specialist who inspected the records for CBS News and said last week that she had raised concerns about their authenticity with CBS News producers, confirmed a report in Newsweek that a producer had told her that the source of the documents said they had been obtained anonymously and through the mail.

In an interview last night she declined to name the producer who told her this but said the producer was in a position to know. CBS News officials have disputed her contention that she warned the network the night before the initial "60 Minutes'' report that it would face questions from documents experts.

A producer whose name starts with an M and ends with an A-P-E-S, perhaps?  In the LAT and WaPo descriptions of how CBS News rushed their broadcast together, I don't recall seeing anyone else identified as a co-producer along with Mary Mapes, although the WaPo article  does state that "Mapes, an associate producer and a researcher were carrying the journalistic load."

Meanwhile, we learn from this story just how tuned in to the basic facts Josh Howard is — or isn't:

In a telephone interview this weekend, Josh Howard, the executive producer of the "60 Minutes'' Wednesday edition, said that he did not initially know who was Ms. Mapes' primary source for the documents but that he did not see any reason to doubt them. He said he believed Ms. Mapes and her team had appropriately answered all questions about the documents' authenticity and, he noted, no one seemed to be casting doubt upon the essential thrust of the report.

"The editorial story line was still intact, and still is, to this day,'' he said, "and the reporting that was done in it was by a person who has turned in decades of flawless reporting with no challenge to her credibility.''

Ummm, Mr. Howard, the "editorial story line" included an allegation that Col. Killian was being pressured to sugar-coat Dubya's evaluations by retired Col. Walter B. ("Buck") Staudt, whom your forger didn't know had retired from the TANG a year and a half before his supposed pressure was applied on Col. Killian.  I'd call that a gaping hole in your "editorial story line," sir — one that doesn't depend on the Killian memos' authenticity or lack thereof.  Would you care to identify what shred of the "essential thrust of the report" remains?  Every bit of the "60 Minutes" broadcast that purported to add any material detail to what was previously known about George W. Bush's service record has turned out to be entirely bogus.  The only parts that haven't been challenged are the parts we all knew before, and have known for years — that he got permission to go to Alabama, and that he didn't maintain his flight status because he wasn't going to be flying there anyway.

[Mr. Howard] added, "We in management had no sense that the producing team wasn't completely comfortable with the results of the document analysis.''

Spoken like a manager who should lose his job, Mr. Howard.

Several people familiar with the situation said they were girding for a particularly tough week for Mr. Rather and the news division should the network announce its new doubts.

One person close to the situation said the critical question would be, "Where was everybody's judgment on that last day?''

Mr. Rather should spend his "tough week" in the unemployment line along with Mr. Howard, Ms. Mapes, and Mr. Heyward.  I'll reserve judgment on Ms. West — she might have redeemed herself on her trip to Texas with Mr. Rather.

I'm quite confident, however, that CBS News will never admit to the correct answer on the question, "Where was everybody's judgment" — because the obvious answer is that they had abandoned their judgment in their lust to bring down a sitting American president.  Whether that lust had its source in reckless desire for journalistic glory or, more likely, in overt partisanship — against Dubya and in favor of anybody-but-Dubya — ought not matter to their saving their jobs.  What does still need genuine investigation, however, is whether there was knowledge of and coordination between Burkett and the Kerry campaign's "Fortunate Son Offensive."

Separately, USA Today's Peter Johnson writes a highly unsatisfactory article for Monday's edition that mostly ducks the genuinely compelling question of its own involvement:

(USA TODAY obtained copies of the memos shortly after the 60 Minutes broadcast and reported that the next day. The newspaper's editors, like those at other media, relied in part on the fact that the White House did not challenge the memos' authenticity and released copies after the broadcast.)

Those parentheses are in the original, folks.  But whatever obligation USA Today may once have had to keep its source confidential — a joke, given that the LAT, WaPo, and NYT have now all but put up billboards in Times Square saying "The Source Was Burkett!" — expired once USA Today concluded that the documents were in fact bogus.  Perhaps USA Today is feverishly working to conduct its own investigation into, for example, connections between the Kerry campaign and their still-nominally-anonymous source.  But it's time for USA Today to stop thinking about scoops, and to start thinking about restoring some measure of public confidence in the mainstream media; playing cute like this isn't the way to do that.  Someone at USA Today should've written — before AllahPundit did late on Saturday, September 16th, and I did shortly after noon on Sunday, September 17th — that USA Today's source had given it two more memos than CBS News had revealed in its initial broadcast on the previous Wednesday.

Meanwhile, Burkett's lawyer, David Van Os, is laying the groundwork to try to absolve Burkett as the forger in a letter to the American Spectator (hat-tip, again, to AllahPundit):

As Lieutenant Colonel Burkett's personal attorney, I do not have the legal right to divulge anything that he may have said to me in confidence in the course of my professional relationship with him. Thus I cannot and will not do so, unless and until he releases me from that professional obligation, which is something that he has the legal right to do or not to do at any time. Based upon my personal knowledge of Bill Burkett's character from knowing him and knowing of his reputation among his peers, I will state unequivocally that Bill Burkett did not falsify or create the "CBS documents." I do not assume that anyone falsified or created those documents until more is known, but if anyone did, it was not Bill Burkett. I will stake my reputation and good name on this certainty. Further from my knowledge of Bill Burkett's character and integrity, I will state unequivocally that if, hypothetically speaking, Bill Burkett handled documents that were recent creations rather than true copies of originals, he would have done so only because he had reason to believe they were true copies rather than recent creations.

Mr. Van Os can't have it both ways here:  Either he doesn't know what the hell he's talking about because he hasn't discussed it with his client, or he's in fact reporting what Mr. Burkett's told him and hence has waived attorney-client privilege (despite his careful language attempting to preserve it).  From what I know of Mr. Van Os, his practice specialty has been in labor relations law, with perhaps some dabbling in civil personal injury work (as, for example, in his prior representation of Mr. Burkett in his claims to have suffered injuries while on a Guard assignment in Panama).  Mr. Van Os and his client would be well advised, if they have not already, to associate counsel whose specialty is criminal law, even if they genuinely believe that Mr. Burkett has committed no crime, lest Mr. Van Os inadvertently waive his client's Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.