Protein Wisdom:
During their single phone call, Joe Lockhart tried to persuade Bill Burkett to pass CBS the forged¹ TxANG documents, Mr Burkett tells the Mercury News (registration required).
In the interview Thursday, Burkett, a West Texas rancher and known critic of Bush, denied that his work with CBS was done at the behest of Democrat John Kerry’s presidential campaign.
He said, however, that during the meeting in which he gave the memos to CBS, he was also told by a producer that his phone number would be passed on to Kerry adviser Joe Lockhart.
“I was absolutely and clearly told that that was as far as anyone could go without crossing the line of (journalistic) ethics,” Burkett said.
During a single phone conversation with Lockhart, Burkett said he suggested a “couple of concepts on what I thought (Kerry) had to do” to beat Bush. In return, he said, Lockhart tried to “convince me as to why I should give them the documents” [my emphasis]
What this means, so far as I can tell (it’s hard to think when your nipples are stiff as petrified Hershey’s Kisses) is that CBS and the DNC were in fact colluding on the TxANG document story—which cuts against the grain of some of the more charitable commentary depicting CBS News as overzealous—but not intentionally partisan—in its rush to bring the story to air.
However, it now appears that Lockhart was actually able to secure the documents for CBS, and that CBS News used connections inside the DNC to net the props for its controversial worldwide exclusive. If the “well-regarded Texan" is to be believed, that is.
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