Posted on 09/16/2004 9:11:36 AM PDT by areafiftyone
CBS is trying to pin the Rathergate forgery rap on former National Guard officer Bill Burkett - who has no prominent ties to the Kerry campaign or the Democratic Party.
According to the New York Times, as CBS was preparing to admit that documents aired by news star Dan Rather might have been fabricated, "a person at the network named Mr. Burkett as a source of records critical of Mr. Bush's Vietnam era service that CBS said last week came from the personal files of Lieutenant Bush's squadron commander, Lt. Col. Jerry B. Killian."
So far Burkett has not responded. And he rebuffed a Times reporter who showed up at his Baird, Texas ranch yesterday.
But the former Guardsman's San Antonio lawyer, David Van Os, told the Times, "The possibility that Bill Burkett would falsify documents or falsify any story is zero."
The paper inexplicably characterized Os's denial as a refusal to answer.
Burkett, however, has been complaining for years that he saw documents from President Bush's National Guard file being tossed in the trash in 1997, with top Bush aide Joe Albaugh allegedly overseeing the file clean-up.
In the last weeks of the 2000 election, he went public with his story for the first time - but failed to produce any records, forged or otherwise, to back it up.
When Democratic National Committee chairman Terry McAuliffe resurrected the Bush Guard story last February, Burkett was in the spotlight again.
He told the Dallas Morning News that Allbaugh ordered the National Guard chief in Texas to get the Bush file and make certain "there's not anything there that will embarrass the governor."
A few days later, said Burkett, he saw Bush's file and documents from it discarded in a trash can. He said he recognized the documents as retirement point summaries and pay forms.
But he made no mention at the time of any memo from Bush's commander, Lt. Col. Killian, who, in the Rathergate forgery, complained about orders to "sugacoat" Bush records.
Unnoted in today's Times report fingering Burkett was the most telling non-denial to surface so far in the Rathergate imbroglio - a refusal by an unnamed senior CBS executive to deny that Rather got the Killian forgery from the Kerry campaign.
According to Sunday's New York Post, the network exec said he "couldn't answer that question," then hung up.
Also overlooked - an intriguing detail cited repeatedly over the last two days by radio host Sean Hannity from Saturday's Dallas Morning News report on Rathergate.
"Earlier this year," reported the paper, "Kerry aides raised the exact points the memo seemed to address."
The evidence of a Kerry connection may be scant so far - but it's a whole lot more persuasive then efforts by the Times and CBS to turn Bill Burkett into Rathergate's fallguy.
Thanks much for this, Arrowhead : .....I think EVERYONE should see the web page that you provided.
You gave me an idea. I may post that to every thread having his name involved.
Interesting........thank you. Seems to do pretty well in the cattle biz, too. Was sort of curious (as you saw) how these two were so tight.
All I've heard is Travis County. The same one where Ben Barnes lives, IIRC.
Purged,my butt. Burkett is tied in here somehow...especially with the army not Air Force lingo in the memo. (or was the lingo the same for both Guards?)
Oh yeah? Then where'd THIS come from?
Bill Burkett's spokesman David Van Os, Austin, TX, August 22, 2004.
Van Os also represented Burkett in his original lawsuit against Bush over the guard. Now that was some far out stuff - Burkett was more or less claiming that Bush had used the Gov's office to dispatch his guard unit to Panama where he caught some wierd jungle fever as retaliation for refusing to go along with the plan to scrub Bush's guard records. The case was thrown out, but that's where much of this Bush National Guard story started.
I MISSED THE CBS EVENING NEWS
Can't find an account of what happened here.....did Rather have anything to say?
"A few days later, said Burkett, he saw Bush's file and documents from it discarded in a trash can."
I smell some 'rats. Any documents that they were trying to get rid of would have gone through the shredder first.
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