Some points:
1) Ryan O'Doherty denied to the Washington Post and Baltimore Sun that he drafted the February 8 e-mail. He says he wasn't working for the Maryland Democratic Party at the time. I've found nothing proving he was working for the Maryland Dems on February 8 - yet. A quote of his was attributed to Ryan O'Doherty "of Maryland Democrat Party" in a
January 23 Washington Post article, and he was listed as the contact person on a
January 9 Maryland Democratic Party Press Release, as cached by Google. (The contact information has since been removed from the
mddems.org version.)
2) The phone number in Response 1's purported O'Doherty e-mail doesn't match Ryan O'Doherty's cell phone number from some of the press releases. It's off by one digit. But if you were typing it up from Jervis Finney's fax, I can understand why. The fax is garbled and hard to read.
3) As I said yesterday, it would be helpful to get the full header information from the O'Doherty e-mail in order to ascertain the IP address of the sender. That's one way we could check if it is a forgery, as O'Doherty claims.
4) I'm in the process of checking through the FEC's records on persons paid by the MD Democrat Party. I skimmed them last night and didn't see O'Doherty's name on the February 2005 or First Quarter 2005 statements.