Tiffany Lied

Ed, as usual, is at the bleeding edge of the CBS Forgery case:

Starting with the latter, it appears that CBS and 60 Minutes simply lied about the sourcing of the documents to its readers. They may not have realized that the documents were forgeries -- they didn't check very hard to find out, though -- but they told their readers and listeners that the documents came from Killian's personal files, which implies that they came to CBS directly from that source. CBS vouched for that chain of custody, knowing that it came from the Kerry campaign, a vital piece of information that its customers could have used initially in determining the veracity of the story.

So what else has CBS aired directly from Kerry's oppo research team without telling us? The most obvious would be CBS' companion interview with Ben Barnes, who claimed to have spoken a few words on Bush's behalf to get him into the TANG. CBS claimed his motivation was to relieve his soul, but failed to mention that Barnes has donated almost a half-million dollars over the past five years to Kerry and the Democrats, and is Kerry's third-largest individual contributor.

But the Kerry campaign has it even worse. Thanks to a barrage of ads from the Swiftvets, Kerry already has suffered damage to his image in voter evaluation of his honesty and integrity. If his campaign passed off forged documents to news organizations to smear George Bush, it will destroy the shreds of his credibility in such a way that he may not even be able to win re-election in his next Senate campaign.

Read the whole thing, and scroll up and down.

This is amazing stuff.

Posted by Mitch at September 10, 2004 06:54 AM | TrackBack