PRESTOPUNDIT

I'M NO LAWYER but doesn't Walter Staudt have a lawsuit here? Especially when you consider this:

LINDA JAMES, FORENSIC DOCUMENT EXAMINER: They contacted me on the 3rd, which was a Friday morning, and they brought the documents. They hand-delivered them to me on a Saturday, which was on the 4th. And then I reported my findings to them on the 5th and told them about the problems with the documents and asked them to send me additional documents and information that I needed.

SCARBOROUGH: Now, after you told them they had problems with the documents, did you suggest to them these documents may, in fact, be forgeries?

JAMES: I told them that I could not authenticate the documents, and that the problems were major problems with those documents, and that I needed to have additional documents and information in order to go ahead and analyze and finish my—analyzing the documents.

SCARBOROUGH: What were your biggest problems with the documents?

JAMES: The problem was with the signatures. And I had just two documents that were in question. And there were structural differences between the known documents, what we call—were submitted as known to me for comparisons with the questioned signatures. And if—there was one signature that had an angle at the top, and that was one of the concerns because he always made rounded tops, in other words. And so I needed to find out questions, if he had health problems or if there was something that might cause that, like a broken arm, or whatever. But that was never satisfied to me or supplied to me. And, of course, there was the superscript with the type, and then the body of the handwriting — the typing, rather, did not have the superscript. There was a space that was skipped after the ones and for the .. so that‘s always a red flag to us. And the signatures were just not right, or I could not find that within his known signatures. And I asked...

SCARBOROUGH: And when you told them this, did they ever get back to you again after you gave them the bad news?

JAMES: They did not get back to me. I did call and ask them, and they told me that they were going to use the National Guard as—to vouch for the documents, and so I had set it aside thinking that they weren‘t going to go forward with us, because—you know, a handwriting expert and document examiner.

SCARBOROUGH: All right, Linda, thanks so much. Let‘s bring our panel in to get them to respond, Tony Blankley, Howard Fineman, Pat Buchanan, and Bob Kohn. Howard Fineman, obviously, you are in the news business. Sometimes “Newsweek” has to pull in experts. If these experts tell you not to go with a story, what would push your editors to do what CBS did and say forget these outside experts, full-steam ahead?

FINEMAN: Well, in my experience, nothing. The number of signals that were ignored here is truly remarkable. You just heard one. There are dozens of others, almost literally dozens, family members who said that Jerry Killian wasn‘t the kind of guy to keep these kind of notes, factual contradictions in terms of dates, 1972 vs. 1973, etcetera. And keep in mind here, what the key document here says, now almost certainly forged document says, is that George Bush as a soldier contradicted a direct order from his superior, in other words, an offense that was punishable by court-martial. So you are alleging in this document that the now president and commander in chief, when he was a young man, committed a court-martialable offense. That has to have the highest possible standard of proof if you are going to go on the air with it .. And I think the strict accuracy and validity of the memos was almost incidental to them.

Could the problem be the journalism schools?

Alex Jones, director of Harvard University's Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy, said it appeared to be an honest mistake by CBS.

UPDATE: WaPo reporter Michael Dobbs discusses Ra^thergate in an online chat. Posted by Greg Ransom