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The documents were produced using letter spacing and formatting conventions that were not devised until the 1980's and 1990's. Someone with a list of all the letterspacings and formatting conventions required could have produced such a document in 1972 using a pantograph engraver, but that someone would happen to hit upon the right formatting conventions or letter spacing by chance is absurd. The notion that someone would use a pantograph engraver for a memo-to-file is also absurd.

Precisely. The typography is, itself, conclusive. The memos were not typed on a conventional typewriter, thus they could not have been produced in 1972.

Ergo, they are patently and demonstrably bogus.

Which means that their content is immediately made irrelevant and meaningless, even though Corey Pein goes on to try to "substantiate" the memos by examining their content. Which, for a "professional journalist" is a bizarre technique, indeed.

Note that the Columbia School of Journalism continues to support the Old Media's malfeasances while throwing dung at the New Media which showed them up. Given that the Old Media is literally dying and the New Media is where the "journalism" jobs will be in the future, one wonders if this approach is really good career counseling for their graduates...

The memos were not typed on a conventional typewriter, thus they could not have been produced in 1972.

Someone in 1972 could have produced a document which was, within the degree of precision allowed by the faxing and crumpling, indistinguishable from the MS-Word forgery given (1) a list of MS-Word's default settings; (2) a list of the ABC widths for characters in Times New Roman 12 (or is it 10?); (3) a pantograph engraver with a font that reasonably matches Times New Roman [it wouldn't have to be an absolutely perfect match, given the document crumpling and faxing]; (4) a ridiculous amount of time to engrave and print these absurd memos-to-file.

The only one of these that could be absolutely regarded as impossible is the font width table. Word's default settings would be an extremely lucky guess, but not totally beyond the realm of statistical probability. The 13pt line spacing would be an odd guess, but not totally out of the question if guessing an integer between 10 and 16; the default margins would be pretty close to those used in 'old days'. Half-inch tab stops are perhaps unusual, but not unreasonable. The only obscure formatting guesses that would be exceptionally improbable would be the selective use of "th"'s, sized just right, and the use of monospaced numerals (when the letters were all proportionally spaced).

The real kicker is the font-width match. There, the problem is cause-and-effect. If I found a sheet of paper which had some numbers written out in my wife's handwriting, but I recognized that the numbers matched last Friday's lottery drawing, I would know my wife didn't write it. Not that it would be less probable that she'd write those particular numbers than any other such set, but rather that it would be much more probable that someone else would forge them.