YES!
Forging military documents is a Federal Crime ... and that ladies and gentlemen is the REAL cover up
The bias to change the out come of a Presidential Election is a different issue
The panel was likely directed to whitewash the scandal precisely BECAUSE if they had reached the same crystal clear conclusion as everybody else - - that political bias was the reason that CBS used forged military documents to try to fix a national election - - then there would be no way for CBS to avoid a criminal investigation.
The report was, in fact, carefully crafted to SHIELD the network. In too-clever-by-half fashion, all aspects of the report which did not deal with the forgeries and the political agenda were beefed up to make the report look "hard-hitting" and "devastating", etc. Concurrent with the release of the report, CBS then lowered the boom on some hapless underlings (while giving a pass to Rather and Heyward) in order to further show the world how "serious" they were.
No wonder Heyward's "weeks, not months" turned into four months - - there was a mountain of careful parsing and legal work involved in crafting a suitable whitewash.