It’s Rathergate all over again, and the same vigilant entities
that brought about to the collapse of CBS News could now also cause
heads to roll among Democratic Senate leadership staffers and
further shame multiple news organizations that would appear to have
fallen for another document hoax.
Very quietly, Senate Republican leadership aides to both Sen.
Rick Santorum and Sen. Mitch
McConnell, as well as the Senate Republican Policy
Committee, have been using the Senate recess break to reconstruct
the purported distribution of a document that media outlets,
including ABC News, the New York Times and a number of
regional newspapers, identified as Senate “GOP talking points” on
the Terri Schiavo fight that unfolded over the
weekend.
“There is a process here for documents like this that are passed
around down on the Senate floor, which is where the media claimed
that the ‘talking points’ were being distributed last Thursday,”
says a Republican policy committee staffer. “There was a lot of
stuff going on Thursday, but a document like this one was not being
distributed. As far as we know, the only documents being handed out
related to votes on a series of amendments being pushed through
before the recess. Schiavo wasn’t part of that package.”
The document, which was posted online by ABC News, as well as
several Democratic-leaning websites, was unsigned, bore no Senate
office letterhead, and was rife with errors, including the
incorrect Senate bill number and the misspelling of Schiavo’s name.
For days, Republicans denied any knowledge of the document, and a
number of Republican Senators claimed they had never seen it.
Beginning over the weekend, when doubts about the document first
appeared on the blogosphere, the document’s provenance began to
unspool. Conservative blogs Powerline, In
the Agora, and Fishkite all have been out front on the story. A number
of blogs found language almost identical to the “talking points” on
a post at the Traditional Values Coalition website. ABC News then
posted the language of the purported document
but not the actual document itself.
ABC News earlier this week was claiming to a number of online
reporters that it never intended to create the impression that this
was a Republican-generated document, only that it had been
circulated among Republican Senators. The Washington Post
claimed that it had confirmed the document’s provenance, but could
not reveal the source.
However, Republican leadership staffers now believe the document
was generated out of the Democratic opposition research office set
up recently by Sen. Harry Reid, and distributed to
some Democratic Senate staffers claiming it was a GOP document, in
the hope — or more likely expectation — that it would then be
leaked by those Democrats to reporters. In fact, the New York
Times stated that it was Democratic staffers who were
distributing the “talking points” document.
“Democrats have tried to pin this document on Santorum’s staff,
on [Sen. Bill] Frist’s staff, on
[Sen. Sam] Brownback’s staff,”
says a Senate leadership staffer. “Watching the investigation
underway on line has energized us enough up here to want to at
least confirm that we weren’t the source, and everything we have
found would confirm that Republicans didn’t generate this memo.
This is just amateurish, and perhaps Democratic staffers think we
put out work product like this, but it’s laughable.”
The staffer added that while just about any House or Senate
staffer with an email account could readily distribute a document,
it was a huge stretch to believe that such a document would end up
being widely distributed by or even to Senators in the cloakroom or
in the well of the Senate. “This has all the telltale signs of a
political dirty trick,” says the staffer.
Other Republican staffers blame not only Democrats but also the
mainstream media which once again put out a story to embarrass
Republicans before checking all the facts first.
Republicans staffers looking into the “talking points” case
believe that at least some of the language used for the original
Traditional Values Coalition may have come from documents pulled
together by the staff of Sen. Mel Martinez, who
has been out front on the Schiavo case, and pressed hard for
federal action to save her life. But there is no evidence that the
talking points were a Martinez staff product.
