FACT CHECKING….As regular readers know, I’m convinced that the 60 Minutes Killian memos were fake and that Mary Mapes and Dan Rather were negligent in putting them on the air. However, via Blogoland, this passage from Power Line is just wrong:
The source of the documents was Bill Burkett, a notorious Bush-hating crank with a personal vendetta against the National Guard. He lied about where he got the documents. First he said they were given to him by someone named “Conn” who promptly left for Europe. (CBS never made any attempt to locate Mr. Conn, who turned out to be fictitious, to verify Burkett’s story or, more important, find out where Conn got them.) After the 60 Minutes story blew up, Burkett admitted that Conn didn’t exist.
Of course Conn exists, and he hadn’t “promptly left for Europe.” That’s where he works. The Boston Globe spoke to him on February 13, 2004, and so did I. You can read my interview with him here.
He’s not the source of the Killian documents, but he’s quite real.
