Free Republic
Browse · Search
News/Activism
Topics · Post Article

Skip to comments.

Former secretary says she didn't type memos
Dallas Morning News ^ | 9/14/04

Posted on 09/14/2004 2:18:24 PM PDT by ambrose

Former secretary says she didn't type memos 04:10 PM CDT on Tuesday, September 14, 2004

By PETE SLOVER / The Dallas Morning News

HOUSTON – The former secretary for the Texas Air National Guard colonel who supposedly authored memos critical of President Bush’s Guard service said Tuesday that the documents are fake, but that they reflect real documents that once existed.

Marian Carr Knox, who worked from 1956 to 1979 at Ellington Air Force Base in Houston, said she prided herself on meticulous typing, and the memos first disclosed by CBS News last week were not her work.

“These are not real,” she told The Dallas Morning News after examining copies of the disputed memos for the first time. “They’re not what I typed, and I would have typed them for him.”

Mrs. Knox, 86, who spoke with precise recollection about dates, people and events, said she is not a supporter of Mr. Bush, who she deemed “unfit for office” and “selected, not elected.”

“I remember very vividly when Bush was there and all the yak-yak that was going on about it,” she said.

(Excerpt) Read more at dallasnews.com ...


TOPICS: Breaking News; Politics/Elections
KEYWORDS: killian; mariancarrknox; napalminthemorning; rathergate; tang
Navigation: use the links below to view more comments.
first previous 1-20 ... 261-280281-300301-320 ... 341-354 next last
To: js1138

The terms "Billet" and Administrative Officer are also used by the Navy. Does that widen the pool of suspected be forgers?


281 posted on 09/14/2004 4:31:01 PM PDT by Wristpin
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 276 | View Replies]

To: JOE6PAK

Jim, I'm a DOCTOR, not a TYPEWRITER REPAIRMAN!!!

282 posted on 09/14/2004 4:31:19 PM PDT by Cincinnatus
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 81 | View Replies]

To: Timeout
There ya go. Every bit of it is in the article. So Dan can say it's TRUE!

Good job. And you know that's what's gonna happen!

283 posted on 09/14/2004 4:31:29 PM PDT by NYCVirago
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 165 | View Replies]

To: ambrose; dfwgator; ArmyBratproud; Eva; handy; Timeout; CatoRenasci; massadvj; Callahan; Williams; ..
...she said they accurately reflect the viewpoints of Lt. Col. Killian and documents that would have been in the personal file

Ergo, this "photo" is legit?

I Don't Think So!

284 posted on 09/14/2004 4:32:51 PM PDT by TeleStraightShooter (Sorry Kerry, you're 3 decimal places adrift: 3,000,000 not 3,000 "displaced"/murdered SE Asians)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 26 | View Replies]

To: TeleStraightShooter

But what matters is that Kerry could have been there with Jane Fonda.


285 posted on 09/14/2004 4:34:18 PM PDT by dfwgator (It's sad that the news media treats Michael Jackson better than our military.)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 284 | View Replies]

To: TeleStraightShooter

Good analogy! Keep posting it.


286 posted on 09/14/2004 4:34:46 PM PDT by Eva
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 284 | View Replies]

To: Robert A. Cook, PE; Steve_Seattle; rocklobster1
True, look at the "Barnes" id on the files.

Barnes, driven out of his "office" by the Sharpsburg (sic) Savings & Loan scandal, WOULD have the reason, method, and motivation to HATE George Bush (senior) so much.

Here is some good dirt about Barnes' association with the Sharpstown scandal (probably the biggest political scandal in Texas history) in the '70s. He's not a credible witness.

The 

Handbook of Texas Online


SHARPSTOWN STOCK-FRAUD SCANDAL. Texas went through one of its traditional and periodic governmental scandals in 1971-72, when federal accusations and then a series of state charges were leveled against nearly two dozen state officials and former state officials. Before normalcy returned, Texas politics had taken a slight shift to the left and had undergone a thorough housecleaning: the incumbent governor was labeled an unindicted coconspirator in a bribery case and lost his bid for reelection; the incumbent speaker of the House of Representatives and two associates were convicted felons; a popular three-term attorney general lost his job; an aggressive lieutenant governor's career was shattered; and half of the legislature was either intimidated out or voted out of office. The scandal centered, initially, on charges that state officials had made profitable quick-turnover bank-financed stock purchases in return for the passage of legislation desired by the financier, Houston businessman Frank W. Sharp. By the time the stock fraud scandal died down, state officials also had been charged with numerous other offenses-including nepotism and use of state-owned stamps to buy a pickup truck.

In the 1972 electoral aftermath, incumbent Democrats were the big losers, although at the top level of officialdom it was a matter of conservative Democrats being replaced by less conservative Democrats. Using the scandal as a springboard, less conservative Democrats and Republicans carried the "reform" battle cry and also gained a stronger foothold in the legislature. Democrats, defensively, charged that the whole scandal atmosphere in Texas was a national Republican plot, originated in the Nixon administration's Department of Justice. But before the smoke cleared, Will Wilson, an ex-Democratic Texas attorney general, by then one of the top Texas Republicans in the federal government, was hounded from his position as chief of the criminal division of the Department of Justice because of his own business dealings with Sharp.

The political tumult that was to become known as the Sharpstown stock fraud scandal started out meekly, though symbolically, on the day Texas Democrats were gathering in Austin to celebrate their 1970 election victories and inaugurate their top officials. Attorneys for the United States Securities and Exchange Commission, late in the afternoon of January 18, 1971, filed a lawsuit in Dallas federal court alleging stock fraud against former Democratic state attorney general Waggoner Carr, former state insurance commissioner John Osorio, Frank Sharp, and a number of other defendants. The civil suit also was filed against Sharp's corporations, including the Sharpstown State Bank and National Bankers Life Insurance Corporation. But it was deep down in the supporting material of the suit that the SEC lawyers hid the political bombshells. There it was alleged that Governor Preston Smith, state Democratic chairman and state banking board member Elmer Baum, House Speaker Gus Mutscher, Jr., Representative Tommy Shannon of Fort Worth, Rush McGinty (an aide to Mutscher), and others-none of them charged in the SEC's suit-had, in effect, been bribed. The plot, according to the SEC, was hatched by Sharp himself, who wanted passage of new state bank deposit insurance legislation that would benefit his own financial empire. The SEC said the scheme was for Sharp to grant more than $600,000 in loans from Sharpstown State Bank to the state officials, with the money then used to buy National Bankers Life stock, which would later be resold at huge profits as Sharp artificially inflated the value of his insurance company's stock. The quarter-of-a-million-dollar profits were, in fact, made. But they weren't arranged by Sharp, the SEC said, until after Governor Smith made it possible for Sharp's bank bills to be considered at a special legislative session in September 1969, and Mutscher and Shannon then hurriedly pushed the bills through the legislature. (Smith later vetoed the bills on the advice of the state's top bank law experts, but not until he and Baum had made their profits on the bank loan-stock purchase deal.)

The state officials denied all the charges, asserting that they had obtained the bank loans and made the stock purchases purely as business transactions unrelated to the passage of Sharp's bank bills. But as the spring of 1971 droned into summer, political pressure mounted on Smith, Baum, Mutscher, and Shannon-even on Lieutenant Governor Ben Barnes, who had been connected in several tangential ways to Frank Sharp, his companies, and the bank bills. By the fall of 1971, when Mutscher and his associates were indicted, the politics of 1972 had begun to take shape. Incumbents moved as far away as possible, politically, from the "old system" and the current state leaders. New candidates came forward, some of them literally with no governmental experience, under a "throw the rascals out" banner.

Mutscher, Shannon, and McGinty were tried in Abilene, on a change of venue from Austin because of adverse pretrial publicity, in February and March 1972. The indictment charged the three men with conspiracy to accept a bribe from Sharp, and District Attorney R. O. (Bob) Smith of Austin said during the trial that Governor Smith was an unindicted coconspirator. Prosecutors acknowledged from the start that the case would be based entirely on circumstantial evidence, which produced legal technicalities inexplicable to laymen. But the jury needed only 140 minutes on March 15, 1972, after exposure to hundreds of pounds and hours of evidence, to find the Mutscher group guilty. The next day, at the request of the defendants, Judge J. Neil Daniel assessed punishment at five years' probation.

The conviction of the Abilene Three dramatically advanced the momentum of the "reform" movement, coming less than three months before primary elections, at which more legislative seats were contested than in any year since World War II.qv (Redistricting decisions by the federal courts added to the high percentage of electoral challenges, but the Sharpstown scandal generally was credited as the main factor.) In statewide races "reform" candidates also dominated. The Democratic governor's race saw two newcomers-liberal legislator Frances (Sissy) Farenthold of Corpus Christi and conservative rancher-banker Dolph Briscoe of Uvalde-run far ahead of Governor Smith, who was seeking a third term as governor, and Lieutenant Governor Barnes, whose seemingly inexorable rise to political prominence was ended when his reputation was tainted by the scandal. Briscoe defeated Farenthold in the runoff and later was elected governor; but Republican candidate Henry Grover of Houston and Raza Unida Partyqv candidate Ramsey Muñiz of Waco drew enough votes to make Briscoe Texas's first "minority" governor. For the state's second top executive branch job, voters chose moderate Houston newspaper executive William P. Hobby, Jr., over seven other Democratic candidates as lieutenant governor-also on a "reform" theme. Reform-minded moderate Democrat John Luke Hill of Houston, a former secretary of state, left a successful private law practice to defeat the popular three-term attorney general, Crawford C. Martin,qv who had been criticized for his handling of the stock fraud scandal and for his own relationship with Frank Sharp. The Democratic primary and the general election of 1972 also produced a striking change in the legislature's membership, including a half-new House roster and a higher-than-normal turnover in the Senate. Most of the newcomers were committed to "reform" in some fashion, regardless of their ideological persuasion. The voters simultaneously indicated that their confidence in the legislature had been restored to some extent, because they approved in November 1972 an amendment allowing the legislature to sit as a constitutional convention in 1974. The convention failed by three votes on July 30, 1974, to approve a proposed new constitution for the voters to consider (see CONSTITUTIONAL CONVENTION OF 1974).

The final impact of the stock fraud scandal on Texas politics occurred during the regular session of the legislature in 1973. The lawmakers, led by new House Speaker Marion Price Daniel, Jr.,qv of Liberty, a moderate and son of a former governor, with active support from Attorney General Hill and Lieutenant Governor Hobby and with verbal encouragement from Governor Briscoe, passed a series of far-reaching reform laws. Among other subjects, the legislation required state officials to disclose their sources of income, forced candidates to make public more details about their campaign finances, opened up most governmental records to citizen scrutiny, expanded the requirement for open meetings of governmental policy-making agencies, and imposed new disclosure regulations on paid lobbyists.

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Charles Deaton, The Year They Threw the Rascals Out (Austin: Shoal Creek, 1973). Sam Kinch, Jr., and Ben Procter, Texas under a Cloud (Austin: Jenkins, 1972). Vertical Files, Barker Texas History Center, University of Texas at Austin. Tracy D. Wooten, "The Sharpstown Incident and Its Impact on the Political Careers of Preston Smith, Gus Mutscher and Ben Barnes," Touchstone 5 (1986).

Sam Kinch, Jr.

Recommended citation:
"SHARPSTOWN STOCK-FRAUD SCANDAL." The Handbook of Texas Online. <http://www.tsha.utexas.edu/ha ndbook/online/articles/view/SS/mqs1.html> [Accessed Wed Sep 8 23:21:34 US/Central 2004 ].

287 posted on 09/14/2004 4:36:55 PM PDT by Paleo Conservative (What's the frequency Kenneth?)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 259 | View Replies]

To: ambrose

288 posted on 09/14/2004 4:38:35 PM PDT by kanawa
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: liz44040
"The more I think about this national guard forgery stuff the more I think that this is designed to be a DIVERSION from Kerry's senate record and Kerry himself. These people must realize that all this stuff about Bush's early years doesn't touch him...they must have another deeper plan - It's hard to believe they are as stupid as they appear to be. I always get scared when I see this stuff then I take a deep breath and realize none of it matters - Bush's poll numbers continue to rise and people just get more cynical about the stuff the Dems are putting out."

What you are referring to is called "The gift of fear" It's there for a reason. Don't discount the fear.

AKA, if it seems too good to be true.....

289 posted on 09/14/2004 4:40:29 PM PDT by fanfan (" The liberal party is not corrupt " Prime Minister Paul Martin)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 28 | View Replies]

To: Robert A. Cook, PE
Consider that, if it weren't for the S&L (some Republican attorney general or prosecutor maybe ?) he (Barnes would have been governor, possible Senator or President by now.

Not in the early 1970s. Just about all the statewide offices were held by yellow dog DemocRATS.

290 posted on 09/14/2004 4:43:26 PM PDT by Paleo Conservative (What's the frequency Kenneth?)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 259 | View Replies]

To: DaughterOfAnIwoJimaVet

See post 187. That username and password works.


291 posted on 09/14/2004 4:52:26 PM PDT by TruthWillWin
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 253 | View Replies]

To: handy
Use

email: hillary@dnc.com
password: hillary

WHo knows how long it will work.

LTS

292 posted on 09/14/2004 4:53:24 PM PDT by Liberty Tree Surgeon (Buy American, the Nation you save may be your own)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 43 | View Replies]

To: Robert A. Cook, PE

If someone comes us with the "Dan/Sauron" eye will you please ping me?
I'm evacuating tonight from Ivan. Thx


293 posted on 09/14/2004 5:19:21 PM PDT by Timeout (Proud, card-carrying member of JAMMIE NATION)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 263 | View Replies]

To: liz44040

They didn't dare wait to make a late October surprise because by then
Kerry's Senate vote record would have taken it's toll. It still will as 'memogate'
is but a temporary diversion. Yet it will continue to haunt Dan Rather
thanks to blogsphere.


294 posted on 09/14/2004 5:19:24 PM PDT by Zon
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 28 | View Replies]

To: Paleo Conservative

Speculation.

(I was wearing my tin-foil PJ's.)

What I was figuring was the Barnes got kicked out of office right as this was going on.

Wasn't in TX politics though at the time, so Ican't match Bush (senior) with Barnes or Bentsen or Bush (junior) or bentson (junior) ....

But they all knew each other, and somebody exposed Sharpstown and cost Barnes teh governor position.


295 posted on 09/14/2004 5:25:25 PM PDT by Robert A Cook PE (I can only donate monthly, but Kerry's ABBCNNBCBS continue to lie every day!)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 290 | View Replies]

To: Paleo Conservative
Circumstatial evidence kicked Barnes out?

"Using the scandal as a springboard, less conservative Democrats and Republicans carried the "reform" battle cry and also gained a stronger foothold in the legislature. Democrats, defensively, charged that the whole scandal atmosphere in Texas was a national Republican plot, originated in the Nixon administration's Department of Justice. But before the smoke cleared, Will Wilson, an ex-Democratic Texas attorney general, by then one of the top Texas Republicans in the federal government, was hounded from his position as chief of the criminal division of the Department of Justice because of his own business dealings with Sharp. That "general" group of conservative democrats and republicans certainly could have included a Congressman named Bush.

296 posted on 09/14/2004 5:29:19 PM PDT by Robert A Cook PE (I can only donate monthly, but Kerry's ABBCNNBCBS continue to lie every day!)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 290 | View Replies]

To: dalebert

When has Juan Williams ever known what he was talking about?

The guy is a carbon copy of affirmative action.


297 posted on 09/14/2004 5:36:17 PM PDT by Prost1 (Why isn't Berger in jail?)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 63 | View Replies]

To: ambrose
What does 'memogate' amount to in the big picture. In President Bush fighting terrorism it amounts to not dotting an "i". In terms of main-stream-media credibility it's a kick to the groin. 
298 posted on 09/14/2004 5:37:12 PM PDT by Zon
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: SandyInSeattle

yeah


299 posted on 09/14/2004 5:43:14 PM PDT by rwfromkansas (BYPASS FORCED WEB REGISTRATION! **** http://www.bugmenot.com ****)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 18 | View Replies]

To: All
"It was General Staudt, not then Lt. Colonel Hodges [who succeeded Staudt], that was putting on the pressure to whitewash Bush. For instance he didnt take his flight examination or his physical. And the pilots had to take them by their birthdays. Once in a while there would be a reason why a pilot would miss these things because some of them were commercial pilots. But they had to make arrangements to take their exams."

I may have miss something but I still have to ask the following questions:
1. When exactly did Staudt retire?
2. Was it before bush was supposed to take his physical?
3. If Staudt retired before Bush's physical, why would Staudt be putting pressure on to whitewash bush's record before there was anything to whitewash? Why would Staudt be putting pressure on to whitewash something that hadn't happened yet (Bush missing his physical?)
300 posted on 09/14/2004 5:44:25 PM PDT by TBBT
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 250 | View Replies]


Navigation: use the links below to view more comments.
first previous 1-20 ... 261-280281-300301-320 ... 341-354 next last

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.

Free Republic
Browse · Search
News/Activism
Topics · Post Article

FreeRepublic, LLC, PO BOX 9771, FRESNO, CA 93794
FreeRepublic.com is powered by software copyright 2000-2008 John Robinson