THE BUSH PAYROLL RECORDS….If you’re interested in the payroll records the White House released today, National Review has posted the complete file here. If you just want to see the guts of it, it’s reproduced below.
I’ve put together portions of two records into a single image. The top part is a pay record showing activity between January-April 1972, with a final entry on April 16. The bottom part is a pay record showing activity between October-November 1972. The first entry is on October 28.
The dates on the bottom record match the ARF attendance records showing duty on October 28-29 and November 11-14. A couple of comments:
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The complete file contains seven separate pay records. The later ones seem to match the ARF attendance records.
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For the first time, the pay records show the exact length of Bush’s absence from duty in 1972: April 17 through October 27. That’s six months.
To be honest, I can’t make sense of all seven records in this file. The format seems to have changed midway through 1972, and the handwritten notations indicate that we’re missing the record for the 3rd quarter of 1972. I don’t know if that’s the way they came from the White House or if it’s a mistake on the part of the NRO staffer who placed the documents on the web.
[UPDATE: Nope, that’s the way they came from the White House. The Washington Post has exactly the same file here.]
What’s more, the two records I spliced together below don’t agree with each other. The top one is supposed to be from the fourth quarter of 1972 but shows no activity in October-November. The bottom one is from the first quarter of 1973 and shows the October-November activity.
Somebody who understands this stuff really needs to take a look through these records and explain what they mean. At first glance something seems to have happened in mid-1972, with the records changing format and a chunk of time missing. But only an expert can say for sure.
