Posted on April 30, 2024 by John Hinderaker in 2024 Election, Democrats, Law

What Should Trump Do?

This morning, Judge Juan Merchan fined Donald Trump $9,000 and threatened to imprison him for violating Merchan’s gag order in the farcical Stormy Daniels case. The order prohibits Trump from commenting publicly on witnesses, jurors or prospective jurors, prosecutors (other than the District Attorney), staff members of the court or District Attorney, or family members of various persons. The offending statements by Trump were mostly reposts of comments by others on Truth Social.

The gag order strikes me as a plain infringement of Trump’s First Amendment rights, despite Judge Merchan’s alleged sensitivity to those rights. Any other litigant or criminal defendant would have a right to comment on trial proceedings, so why not Trump?

Judge Merchan has also required Trump to be physically present in court each day of the trial, for the evident purpose of preventing him from campaigning, and thus gaining an edge on the senile Joe Biden. But Merchan graciously “allowed” Trump to attend his son’s high school graduation.

The whole prosecution is a farce. Alvin Bragg has charged Trump with filing false corporate documents, a misdemeanor on which the statute of limitation has run. In order to resurrect that dead claim, Bragg’s indictment says that the documents were filed to cover up another crime. But what was that crime? Incredibly, the indictment doesn’t say. The jury likely is getting the impression that the “crime” was conspiring to steal the 2016 election by trying to suppress bad news about Trump. But of course there is no such crime; if there were, the Capitol would be sparsely inhabited. What we have here is sheer election denialism by the Democrats.

Andy McCarthy argues that Bragg’s prosecution violates both the United States Constitution and New York’s Constitution:

Bragg, an election denier, is trying to convict Trump of a crime that is not charged in the indictment — to wit, conspiracy to steal the 2016 election by suppressing negative information in violation of federal campaign law. This violates the Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution, which requires a felony charge to be spelled out in an indictment whose criminal elements have been established by probable cause to the satisfaction of a grand jury. Here, the problem is not just that there is no indication the grand jury was presented with an election-theft conspiracy offense; there is no such conspiracy crime in New York penal law. As a state prosecutor, moreover, Bragg has no jurisdiction to enforce federal law — as to which Congress vested “exclusive” criminal- and civil-enforcement authority, respectively, in the Justice Department and the Federal Election Commission.

Worse still is that Judge Juan Merchan is not just letting Bragg get away with this; he is consciously abetting the district attorney — thus adding heft to Trump’s claim that Merchan is deeply conflicted by political bias.

Andy goes on to make a technical argument under New York’s Constitution. His legal arguments are well taken, but the reality is perhaps even more stark. This prosecution is entirely fraudulent. It was cooked up by the Democratic Party to interfere in the 2024 presidential race. Alvin Bragg and Judge Merchan, along no doubt with other Democratic Party officials, are in on the scheme. The prosecution is entirely a political act, and has zero legal legitimacy.

The question then is, what should Trump do about it? I think that he would be legally and constitutionally justified in refusing to cooperate. He could ignore Merchan’s partisan orders and decline to have anything to do with the proceeding. He could get back on the campaign trail, where he belongs. On this scenario, Trump presumably would be convicted in absentia, which would mean that he couldn’t enter New York State for a while. But he is going to be convicted anyway, in all probability, despite the fact that, legally speaking, the prosecution is a joke. He can appeal, but appeals won’t be concluded before the election.

If Trump stops collaborating with the Bragg charade, Democrats will naturally say that the president (or ex-president) is not above the law. But what we are dealing with here is not the law. Alvin Bragg and Juan Merchan have cooperated to subvert the law. The Manhattan proceeding has no more legal or moral legitimacy than Stalin’s show trials of the 1930s. The difference is that Trump isn’t being tortured in Lubyanka Prison, so he doesn’t have to cooperate.

So what should Trump do? I suppose the answer is ultimately political, just like the prosecution. I think Trump might do better by repudiating the fake legal proceeding than by collaborating with it and being convicted, but then, I am no political consultant (happily).

But whatever Trump decides to do, on this and other absurd Democratic Party prosecutions, he deserves our support. In its desperation to retain its grip on power, the Democratic Party has turned the United States into a banana republic. Never in our political history has there been anything as disgraceful as the lawfare the Democrats have launched against Trump. For their misconduct, they deserve to pay a steep political price.

Posted on by Steven Hayward in Climate, Fake News, Media Bias

Move Over Dan Rather—There’s a Climate Crisis to Save!

It turns out that Dan Rather isn’t the only beneficiary of revisionist documentaries and feature films that pervert the truth. I somehow missed it, but two years ago a British drama attempted to reverse the narrative of the famous “climategate” scandal of 2009, when a trove of internal emails from the tight-knit circle of scientists clustered around East Anglia University in the UK revealed some serious weaknesses of the standard climate change narrative.

I wrote about it at length at the time, in “Scientists Behaving Badly.” As I noted in that article:

As in the furor over Dan Rather’s fabricated documents about George W. Bush’s National Guard service back in 2004, bloggers have been swarming over the material and highlighting the bad faith, bad science, and possibly even criminal behavior (deleting material requested under Britain’s Freedom of Information Act and perhaps tax evasion) of a small group of highly influential climate scientists. As with Rathergate, diehard climate campaigners are repairing to the “fake but accurate” defense–what these scientists did may be unethical or deeply biased, they say, but the science is settled, don’t you know, so move along, nothing to see here.

And in a subsequent article, after thousands more emails were disclosed, I argued that “Climategate did for the global warming controversy what the Pentagon Papers did for the Vietnam war 40 years ago: It changed the narrative decisively.”

At the center of the controversy was Prof. Phil Jones, the director of the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at East Anglia. One his emails, just ahead of the next IPCC climate science report in 2007, pertained to Michael Mann’s infamous “hockey stick” graph that is offered as proof of human-caused climate change in the 20th century, read as follows:

I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (i.e., from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline. [Emphasis added.]

It was necessary to “hide the decline” because several temperature series showed a moderation or even decline in global temps in the second-half of the 20th century, which doesn’t fit the catastrophe narrative.

It turns out that two years ago, a feature film was released in the UK that attempted to do for Phil Jones what 2015’s feature film “Truth” tried to do for Dan Rather: whitewash the story, say black is white, A is non-A, and other perversion of the actual truth. The movie aired on BBC and also, apparently, over here on PBS. Here are the two short trailers that differ slightly, with one thing in common—a crime was committed, by nefarious forces who want to destroy the planet:

In fact, as was known early on, the emails were leaked by an insider disgusted with the shabby science being represented as ironclad, and not hacked or stolen by an outside party. Hide the decline indeed.

Posted on by Steven Hayward in The Daily Chart

The Daily Chart: Breaking Wind

Every sensible person knows that wind power blows (and occasionally blows chunks), but today the Energy Information Administration (EIA) takes note. We’re adding massive wind power capacity under Joe Biden’s blowout “Inflation Reduction Act,” yet last year wind power output somehow went down:

EIA’s write-up offers some fine comedy and obfuscation:

U.S. electricity generation from wind turbines decreased for the first time since the mid-1990s in 2023 despite the addition of 6.2 gigawatts (GW) of new wind capacity last year. Data from our Power Plant Operations Report show that U.S. wind generation in 2023 totaled 425,235 gigawatthours (GWh), 2.1% less than the 434,297 GWh generated in 2022.

U.S. wind capacity increased steadily over the last several years, more than tripling from 47.0 GW in 2010 to 147.5 GW at the end of 2023. Electricity generation from wind turbines also grew steadily, at a similar rate to capacity, until 2023. Last year, the average utilization rate, or capacity factor, of the wind turbine fleet fell to an eight-year low of 33.5% (compared with 35.9% in 2022, the all-time high).

The 2023 decline in wind generation indicates that wind as a generation source is maturing after decades of rapid growth. Slower wind speeds than normal affected wind generation in 2023, especially during the first half of the year when wind generation dropped by 14% compared with the same period in 2022. [Emphasis added.]

“Maturing,” they say. Looks more like early senescence. And even the EIA can’t conceal that wind “capacity” does not equal actual output. A windmill with a “capacity” of 3 MW isn’t really 3 MB if it only produces electricity a third of the time.

Posted on by John Hinderaker in Anti-Semitism, Democrats, Protests

Disaster at Columbia [Updated]

Kill-the-Jews protesters at Columbia have taken over that school’s main administration building, Hamilton Hall. Scenes from the campus are horrifying:


It will be interesting to see whether these vandals are punished as harshly as the January 6 protesters.


These riots are a disaster for Columbia. This is true in several respects; for one thing, the demonstrators are robotic morons, mindlessly repeating pro-genocide chants. Intellectually, they are about on a par with Joe Biden reading “pause” off the teleprompter. I wonder whether Columbia’s academic reputation can recover. For another, the university’s administration has behaved spinelessly throughout the crisis. Columbia administrators have thus joined those from Harvard, MIT and Penn as objects of ridicule.

Perhaps most notably, campus riots like the ones at Columbia could be a disaster for the Democratic Party. That is what happened in the late 60s. Voters hate these childish and destructive outbursts. Conservatives like Ronald Reagan (and moderates like S.I. Hiyakawa) who stood up to student tantrums became heroes, while soft-on-crime Democrats suffered. That likely will happen again. Worst of all, the antiwar (ar, more accurately, pro-Viet Cong) riots that engulfed the Democratic National Convention in 1968 likely dealt a death blow to Hubert Humphrey’s candidacy. The same thing could happen again, in the same venue–Chicago.

Democrats had better figure out a way to deal with their pro-genocide left, or they could be in trouble.

UPDATE: The New York Post has nice updates on events at Columbia and other campuses beset by riots.

Posted on by John Hinderaker in Gender Follies

Britain Gets Sane

Britain’s National Health Service is aligning itself with reality by acknowledging that sex is a biological fact:

The NHS is to declare that sex is a matter of biology in a landmark shift against gender ideology.

Changes to the health service’s written constitution proposed by ministers will for the first time ban trans women from women-only wards, and give women the right to request a female doctor for intimate care.
***
Campaigners for women’s rights welcomed the significant shift, which comes after years of wrangling and follows accusations that the health service had been captured by “gender ideology”.

One of the Left’s great PR coups was selling the idea that there is something called “gender” that is distinct from, and different from, sex. There isn’t. That is just another example of liberals’ conviction that by mandating changes in language, they alter reality.

I credit novelist J.K. Rowling, who has campaigned fearlessly for women’s rights by opposing “trans” insanity in Britain. I suspect she had a lot to do with the NHS’s turnabout.

Posted on by Scott Johnson in Coronavirus, Crime, Minnesota

Feeding our fraud goes to trial

I went to federal court in downtown Minneapolis yesterday morning for the opening statements in tbe first Feeding Our Future fraud trial. When it comes to Covid fraud, we’re number 1. The case features a cast of “diverse” defendants without much diversity. They are almost all Somali, I am sorry to say. By the same token, I believe that one of my Somali friends helped expose the fraud and assist in the investigation.

All together, 70 defendants have been charged to date. Eighteen have pleaded guilty. One or two have agreed to cooperate with the prosecution. All the cases have been assigned to United States District Judge Nancy Brasel.

At the center of the fraud is a white woman — one Aimee Bock. She recruited a large cast of Somali immigrants to participate through her nonprofit Feeding Our Future, which sponsored most of the vendors who signed up to serve meals to kids at government expense during the Covid regime. Bock’s trial should be first, but instead we have the first group of seven Somali defendants in the current case. This case involves $40 million of the $250 million total that the government alleges to have been paid out as a result of the fraud.

KARE 11’s Lou Raguse is my favorite local reporter covering the case. Below is his report on the opening statements. The Star Tribune’s Kelly Smith has a good account here. The left-wing Minnesota Reformer has the dogged Deena Winter on the case. Her story is here. If you have any interest in the case, check out their stories.

It took the better part of a week to pick the jury because of pretrial publicity. The jurors and alternates selected for service know nothing of the case. If you went to the Minnesota State Fair and scooped up the first 18 people you ran into, you would have a good chance of ending up with these jurors. I want to offer just a few notes on the themes of the opening statements I saw yesterday.

The courtroom is packed with lawyers, defendants, and defense counsel. It is difficult to keep track of the players without a scorecard. The government is represented by four Assistant United States Attorneys. (One of them is the husband of a beloved cousin of mine. We are proud to have him in the family.)

The defendants include six young men and one young woman. The woman is alleged to have grifted $30,000. She is a bit player.

The government set the stage with a recollection of the Covid regime. Life changed in a moment (and not for the better, but the prosecutor didn’t exactly say that). In this case, the government started handing out cash in the name of “the children” and took down the guardrails that ordinarily constrain such handouts.

The defendants took advantage of the cash to feed the kids to enrich themselves. They perpetrated an epidemic of their own — an epidemic of lying and fraud. They claim to have served 18 million meals at small restaurants and other outlets in the metropolitan area and around the state, but they pocketed the children’s lunch money for themselves. They spent their exorbitant and ill-gotten gains on a lavish array of houses, real estate, global travel, luxury automobiles, and jewelry. The prosecutor displayed photos of boxes of cash taken by one or two of the defendants themselves and removed from their phones pursuant to search warrants executed in January 2022.

I wondered if the absence of Aimee Bock would be a problem for the government in the prosecution of these case. I also wondered if the government’s contribution to the fraud by relaxing the otherwise applicable rules would facilitate the defense of the cases.

I stayed around for three of the seven defendants’ opening statements. I found it hard to keep a straight face while listening to defense counsel and wondered how they kept it together themselves. Here are the themes I heard in no particular order. Please forgive the occasional repetition.

• These guys were entrepreneurs operating for-profit companies. The sponsors were nonprofits and they relied on them to navigate the system. Sure, they made a profit. That was the idea.

• “Waivers.” To maximize the beneficence of the free food programs, the Minnesota Department of Education waived otherwise applicable requirements. The defendants did they best they could to play by the rules left standing as they understood them.

• They delivered real food — “food not fraud.” I take it that pictures of bulk good in boxes will form a key part of the defense. Food was bought and delivered.

• The defendants operated in good faith. They did the best they could with a lack of clear guidance from the government. They will be pointing the finger at the government and Aimee Bock’s Feeding Our Future organization.

• What we have here is “Monday morning quarterbacking” by the government. That’s what the man said.

• The government’s key cooperating witness must be good. The best of the three defense lawyers went out of his way to characterize him as a liar seeking a good-conduct letter from the government to keep him out of jail. But — this is me talking — he is obligated to testify truthfully and Judge Brasel herself will render what she believes is the appropriate sentence under the sentencing guidelines.

• These young men made money fulfilling their dreams of success by working hard. It’s the American way.

• Each defendant’s personal story of emigration from Somalia to Minnesota featured the Somali civil war that “crashed down” on them. I couldn’t help but wonder, what about us?

• One of the defense lawyers referred to the four United States Attorneys prosecuting the case. He was all by his lonesome with his client. However, his client had a lot of company with the other defendants and their lawyers.

A final observation of my own. The seven defendants are well-dressed (the government appears not to have succeeded in confiscating all the funds in issue), young, and attractive in their own way. They look better than the shots in Lou Raguse’s story. I think they would have had a constructive contribution to make if they weren’t looking for, or susceptible to taking advantage of, the seams in a system that seems to abound in free money.

NOTE: John Hinderaker and Bill Glahn previewed this trial in their excellent April 19 Center of the American Experiment webinar. The video is accessible here at American Experiment’s site. Bill is an authority on the case.

Posted on by Scott Johnson in Books, George W. Bush, History

The Mapes miasma

I am warming up to watch the documentary Rather, celebrating the career of the disgraced former CBS News anchor. It is to be aired this coming Wednesday on Netflix. Apparently having access to a screener for media critics, the Star Tribune’s Neal Justin found the documentary to be wanting (“when it comes to the stumbles, like walking off the set when a tennis match went long, the legendary broadcaster goes missing”).

Speaking of “stumbles,” we have the matter of Rathergate. However, “stumble” doesn’t quite capture it. “Disgrace,” “disaster,” and “fraud” are more like it.

Award-winning CBS News producer Mary Mapes was the real author of Rathergate. Dan Rather was the mouthpiece. Rather magnified the underlying fraud into an epic moment by standing behind the story for 12 days. Rather thought he could tamp down the scandal on his reassuring say-so. Like the clueless elders in the Bob Dylan song, he did not understand that “the order [was] rapidly fadin'” or that “the times they [were] a changin’.”

In November 2005 Mary Mapes told her story in a memoir published by St. Martin’s Press. I must be one of the few citizens of the United States to have read it. Let us take a look back with the review I wrote for this Weekly Standard online column at the time in slightly revised form.

* * * * *

Mary Mapes is back. With her memoir, Truth and Duty: The Press, The President, and the Privilege of Power, the former CBS News producer is trying to write a second act for her career.

Mapes was the producer of the CBS 60 Minutes II segment on President Bush’s service in the Texas Air National Guard that aired on September 8, 2004. According to the segment, President Bush had received preferential treatment in being admitted to the Guard, and once in, had served dishonorably. The segment predicated the latter theme on four 1972 and 1973 documents from the “personal file” of Lieutenant Colonel Jerry Killian, then-Lt. Bush’s commanding officer in the Texas Air National Guard. CBS had obtained the documents from a confidential source. In the online version of the story, CBS posted PDF versions of the four documents.

The authenticity of the documents was originally attacked on the website Free Republic by an anonymous poster (since revealed to be Atlanta attorney Harry MacDougald) late on the evening of September 8. Throughout the following day, blogs including Power Line explored the apparent phoniness of the documents by posting information received from readers and fellow bloggers. At Little Green Footballs, blogger Charles Johnson announced by mid-morning that he had created an exact copy of one of the four CBS documents on Microsoft Word default settings, with the font set on Times New Roman; he declared the documents forgeries. (Mapes says this replication “proved nothing, other than the fact that computers can replicate all kinds of things.”)

The 60 Minutes II segment unraveled quickly. Mainstream media outlets followed up on the issues raised by the blogs. For 12 days CBS stood behind the broadcast. On September 20, CBS apologized for the story. It also appointed former Attorney General Richard Thornburgh and former AP head Louis Boccardi to an “independent review panel” to investigate the affair.

Surveying the chain of events which led to CBS abandoning her story, Mapes now proclaims that rabid right-wing blogs have joined forces with Fox News, talk radio, and “magazines like The Weekly Standard” to form “a well coordinated attack machine out there in the media world, a monster that waits in the woods for an opening and then overpowers its victim.” It hardly needs to be said that Mapes sees herself–not President Bush–as the victim.

In January 2005, the independent review panel issued its report and CBS promptly fired Mapes. In Truth and Duty Mapes attacks the Thornburgh-Boccardi report and proudly stands behind her 60 Minutes II segment. She reiterates her disparagement of President Bush’s service in the Texas Air National Guard and supports the authenticity of the documents in question based on her “meshing” analysis, claiming that they neatly fit with the known facts of Bush’s service. (They don’t; more on that later.)

The reviews for Mapes have been surprisingly positive (see Kenneth Bunting in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Ed Bark in the Dallas Morning News, and Paul Farhi in the Washington Post). Even the mixed notices, such as Jonathan Alter’s essay in the New York Times Book Review, find Mapes’s book worthy of serious consideration. For his part, Alter deems Mapes’s counterattack on the “cyber-lynch mob” among “the most illuminating parts of the book.”

What is certainly illuminating is the degree to which Truth and Duty makes plain the level of malice Mapes has for Bush. Although she offers herself as an impartial journalist searching for truth, her tract seethes with Bush hatred. Mapes suggests that Bush’s “success in skewing the public perception of his military service was a prelude to his success in shaping public opinion around the reasons for the war in Iraq, the treatment of detainees, the need for a tax cut, and every political battle he has fought and won in his White House years.” She refers to “the Bush campaign’s aggressive pattern of sliming anyone and everyone who raised questions about the president.” She describes Karl Rove as Bush’s “über-adviser” and bizarrely credits him with masterminding “the Republican attack against the [60 Minutes II] story.” Given her claims of the documents’ authenticity, she absolves Rove of fabricating and planting the documents–“not that I believe Rove isn’t capable of that kind of dirty trick.”

It is a shame that those reviewers favorable to Mapes’s book appear not to have read the Thornburgh-Boccardi report, which is full of information that discredits the segment in its entirety, belies Mapes’s book, and establishes far beyond reasonable doubt that the documents on which Mapes staked her career are fraudulent. So, before Mapes’s revisionism takes hold, let’s look at the evidence of the documents’ fraudulence in three areas explored by the report, all bearing on authentication of the documents.

(1) The source of the documents: There is no evidence that the documents came from Lieutenant Colonel Killian, as Mapes claims. The documents purport to derive from his “personal file.” Killian died in 1984; his family denies that the documents emanated from him or them. The lack of any evidence to substantiate the provenance of the documents in Lieutenant Colonel Killian’s “personal file” by itself highlights the absurdity of Mapes’s argument for their authenticity.

We now know that Mapes’s source for the documents was one Bill Burkett. How did Burkett come by the documents? The Thornburgh-Boccardi report notes that Burkett gave three explanations as to how the documents came into his possession, stories whose implausibility increases in each succeeding version. He first told Mapes that the documents mysteriously materialized in the mail. (Mapes omits this first explanation in her book.) He then told Mapes that the documents were provided to him by one George Conn, but that Conn would never admit to being the source.

Such was Burkett’s story at the time of the broadcast; so apparently Mapes believed it. After the broadcast, when CBS set out to establish the authenticity of the documents, Burkett told his third and final version of the story. Here is Mapes’s account:

Burkett told us that he had received a phone call in early March of 2004 from an unidentified man, who said that a woman named Lucy Ramirez wanted to speak with him. Burkett said he was told to call her at a Houston Holiday Inn that night between 7:00 and 10:00 P.M. and that he was given a specific room number to ask for. Burkett said that Ramirez told him she was a go-between, a person who was supposed to deliver a package to him.

Burkett told us that Ramirez made him promise that he would handle the package he received from her very specifically. He agreed to copy the documents inside, then burn the original papers he had received, which were also copies, not originals. He was also to burn the envelope they had come in. Burkett said that he agreed to this, assuming that Lucy or whoever she was wanted to destroy any DNA evidence that might be gleaned from the papers or the package they had come in.

Burkett said that Ramirez asked him if and when he would be in Houston and he told her he would be at the Houston livestock show within a couple of weeks, where he and his wife, Nicki, showed and sold Simmenthal cattle. It was an annual showcase for the breed and a good way to advertise the bull semen . . . they and other ranchers sold to make a living. Burkett told Ramirez what he would be working the front information booth at the show, which was held in a large arena.

Burkett said that on his first day working the booth he was handed the papers by a dark-skinned man. He said the man approached him, asked his name, and handed him a legal envelope. We were able to confirm with the cattle association that Burkett had indeed worked the front booth on that date. A coworker of his at the cattle show said that, as Burkett told us, he had asked her to hold a legal envelope for him while a man handed him the papers.

As a fittingly bizarre last touch, Burkett told our group that he had hidden the papers in his venison locker, close to one hundred miles from his home. He boasted that he’d driven so fast to get to our meeting that the papers were still cold from his freezer when he handed them to me.

Mapes calls Burkett’s third story–which she also purports to believe–a “tale of bovine intrigue.” But would any reasonable person believe that the documents procured from Burkett are what they purport to be based on this “tale”? Here is Mapes’s credo:

As I sat listening to Burkett’s scenario spill out, I realized how truly ridiculous this sounded from our vantage in New York. But in Texas, one of the world capitals of “shit happens,” a place where bull semen is worth its weight in gold (and the bizarre long ago became the mundane), I believed it was quite possible that Bill Burkett was finally telling the truth, the whole weird truth, and nothing but the truth. By God, in Texas, anything could happen.

“Quite possible” is a rather low threshold of credibility.

(2) The font/typestyle of the documents: The Thornburgh-Boccardi report provides the analysis of forensic document examiner and typewriter expert Peter Tytell, both in the text and at greater length in the report’s Appendix 4. Tytell is a diplomate of the American Board of Forensic Documents Examiners and a highly qualified expert on the issues raised by the typographic characteristics of the documents. Tytell examined the official Bush Guard documents as well as the CBS documents procured from Burkett and concluded that the Burkett documents were produced on a computer in Times New Roman typestyle.

According to Tytell, Times New Roman was designed in 1931 for the Times of London and was only available on typesetting and other non-tabletop machines until the desktop publishing revolution in the 1980s. Tytell concluded that the Times New Roman typestyle was not available on a typewriter in the early 1970s and that the Burkett documents must have been produced on a computer. The Thornburgh-Boccardi report states: “The [Thornburgh-Boccardi] Panel met with Tytell and found his analysis sound in terms of why he believed that the documents are not authentic.” If the documents are not authentic, they are frauds.

How does Mary Mapes address Peter Tytell’s analysis? Tytell’s name does not appear in her book. Mapes does, however, dispute the proposition that the Burkett documents are in Times New Roman font (she suggests that they are in Press Roman). She writes: “There are comparisons of some of the letters in the memos with the Times New Roman version of the same letter at www.truthandduty.com.” No such comparison appears on her site. When I called her in advance of this review, the editor of Mapes’s book (Elizabeth Kieffer) told me the comparison had been removed from Mapes’s site as the result of a technical glitch and said she would fax it to me if she could find it. No fax ever arrived.

Readers interested in this issue should also be aware of Joseph Newcomer’s definitive analysis of the typographic issues. Newcomer reports that he reproduced Charles Johnson’s experiment recreating the August 1, 1972 Burkett document in Microsoft Word in less than five minutes. Newcomer adds: “I was a bit annoyed that the experiment dealing with the 18-August-1973 memo was not compatible, until I changed the font to an 11.5-point font. Then it was a perfect match, including the superscript ‘th’.”

(3) The content of the documents: Mapes ultimately relies on the contents of the documents to authenticate them. However, if the documents did not come from the personal file of Lieutenant Colonel Killian, if the documents were not typed on a typewriter, they cannot be authentic regardless of their content. Even if the documents “meshed” perfectly with the official Bush Guard records, they would still be frauds. Yet Mapes’s “meshing” analysis is also deficient.

Mapes’s analysis of the contents of the documents is scattered throughout her book and in the book’s Appendix 2, her “meshing document.” The “meshing document” is posted in full on her site. The Thornburgh-Boccardi report devotes an entire chapter (chapter VIII) to Mapes’s meshing analysis, comparing the official Bush Guard records with the Burkett documents. The report found several problems with the content of the documents.

To take just one example, in the Burkett document dated May 4, 1972, Lieutenant Colonel Killian orders Bush to report for a physical at Ellington Air Force Base no later than May 14, 1972. Testimony from witnesses, including Major General Bobby Hodges and other officers who served with Bush at Ellington Air Force Base, indicated that no one had ever seen or heard of “an order commanding anyone to take a physical, much less Lieutenant Bush.” The requirement of an annual physical was automatic.

The report found that there was a 90-day window during which a pilot could take his physical, and that the window ended on the last day of a pilot’s birth month; in Bush’s case, the earliest he could have sought a timely physical was on May 4, 1972 and the 90-day window for it would have closed on July 31, 1972. The Thornburgh-Boccardi report accordingly concluded that the May 4, 1972 memo “does not mesh well with the official Bush records.”

Colonel William Campenni also addressed the memo in a January 2005 Washington Times column after the release of the Thornburgh-Boccardi report. Campenni noted:

[F]or the weekend that 1st Lt. Bush was supposedly ordered to report for his physical, May 13-14, 1972, the Ellington Air Guard Base was closed. It was Mother’s Day. Except for emergencies, Air Guard units never drilled on Mother’s Day; the divorce lawyers would be waiting at the gate.

If George Bush showed up at the clinic that weekend, he would have had to get the key from the gate guard. The drill weekend for May 1972 was the following weekend, May 20-21.

What does Mapes have to say about these “meshing” problems in Truth and Duty? Nothing.

In an important sense, however, Truth and Duty gives us a key insight into the motivations of Mary Mapes. She is still peddling the same fraud that she was peddling on September 8, 2004, but whatever the state of her knowledge was then, she must now know that she is peddling a fraud. Although Mapes portrays herself throughout the book as a victim, she is in fact a perpetrator who has yet to acknowledge her offense.