Bush AWOL documents fake?

Hey girl, when should i call you?

(Please excuse us, phone problems . . . )

It was a way obvious coordination...and Rather's apology was tantamount to Janet Jackson saying she had a wardrobe malfunction.

Meh. Everyone knows Rove was behind this.



Cycloptichorn

LOL ... if Rove, or for that matter anyone in The Republican Camp, engineered and pulled this off, the best advice for The Democrats would be to pack it in right now and shift all their energy and resources to a last-stand defence in '08.

"Brush's Brain" author comments re faked documents
James C. Moore, Co-Author of "Bush's Brain" and an Expert on Karl Rove and Bush's National Guard Lies, Speculates on the CBS Memos. Are They True Fabrications?

September 20, 2004

Men of Destiny

"It is one thing to show a man that he is in error, and another to put
him in possession of the truth."
John Locke

By James C. Moore, Co-Author of "Bush's Brain" and Author of "Bush's War for Reelection"

Liars are not supposed to last. Eventually, their fabrications can be expected to collapse and all of the sickness they have spread is cured by truth and righteousness. Most of the time that's what happens. But there is a new perception in the American political process and it is a threat to candidates and our democracy. Lying has become an acceptable tactic. And the immorality of lying is no longer a reason to dismiss it as an effective tool. When voters are not paying attention, lying works. But it still creates casualties and they are beginning to accumulate in the controversy surrounding CBS and the George W. Bush National Guard memos.

In the cascade of events that has led CBS News into trouble, the first lie actually belongs to the President of the United States. No one any longer has doubt that there are records missing from the president's Military Personnel Records Jacket. Huge gaps of service time are simply unaccounted for. Also, there is no commander's report or counseling statement, which is required by guard regulations, to explain the grounding of Lt. Bush. Oddly, not one journalist has ever asked the president why he did not show up for his flight physical. His spokesman, Dan Bartlett, has been able to explain away the controversy by saying the physical was "a formality because he was no longer flying." That's not true, of course, because pilots are not allowed to decide on their own they no longer want to fly. Instead of addressing that matter, though, the White House consistently claims, "The president got an honorable discharge and is proud of his service in the National Guard."

The available evidence is still pointing in the direction of deceit and the smoke machine fueled by the CBS memos cannot hide that fact. The president continues to refuse to allow uncontrolled access to his microfilmed documents at the National Personnel Records Center in St. Louis or the Air Reserve Personnel Center in Denver and the hard copy file is incomplete. People who know the truth about the president's time in the Texas Air National Guard are angry that the cover up of his failings has been so effective. And now there are suspicions that the individuals who have long sought after the truth may have succumbed to the power of fighting a well-told lie with another; not so well-told. If this has happened, much more than just CBS' future is at risk.

Reports that one of the controversial documents was faxed from a Kinko's in Abilene are interpreted as evidence of the involvement of Lt. Col. (Ret.) Bill Burkett. Burkett, who has never concealed his anger at Mr. Bush, lives less than a half hour from the Kinko's location. After appearing with me for an interview on Real Time with Bill Maher, Burkett, his wife, and a colleague of mine discussed politics over dinner. I had been talking to Burkett for over a year, gathering information and trying to corroborate a story he had told me and one other reporter about a purging of George W. Bush's hard copy file at the Texas National Guard headquarters on Camp Mabry in Austin. Neither then, nor now, did Burkett attempt to hide his disdain for President Bush.

"I don't know how he's doing this," Burkett said. "He says whatever he wants. It has nothing to do with the truth. And people are letting him get away with it. He's just lying. Over and over again. About his past. About Iraq. You name it."

I had included Burkett's story in my new book, which was just being released at the time of our interview with Maher. What he had detailed, with unfailing repetition, was consistent with what I knew to be the facts based upon the released Bush file and dozens of other interviews I had conducted over the years. Burkett's reputation was also considered impeccable by a number of people I had interviewed both on and off the record. Even the Chief Warrant Officer, George Conn, who later discounted Burkett's version of events, described him as an honorable man who never opened his mouth without speaking the truth. Besides, Burkett was in the midst of a retirement on the edge of the Chihuahua Desert, enjoying time with his wife and their grandchildren. But his health was failing. He suffered neural and muscular problems as a result of a virus he said he had contracted on a military mission in Panama. Bill Burkett did not seem a likely candidate to make up stories and take on the White House.

Burkett told me that he had witnessed hard copy documents being dumped out of Bush's file and into a wastebasket. According to his memory, there were "retirement points" and pay sheets in the trash and he had a moment to "lightly rummage" through them as two other officers stepped away to talk. The officer Burkett claimed was doing the cleansing of the Bush file, Gen. John Scribner, has denied the story as has Conn, who had asked Burkett to go for a walk that evening and took him on a circuitous route to the building where Scribner was allegedly going through the file. In 1997, when this was supposed to have occurred, Bush was preparing to run for re-election as governor and was prepping a presidential campaign. Cleaning up a hard copy file and then controlling access to the microfilmed record was a simple method for hiding the facts. Bill Burkett either had a fanciful imagination or his unfettered access to senior officers in the Texas Guard had serendipitously put him a few right places at all the wrong times.

Burkett, who is subject to seizures as a result of his virus and has begun to need a cane to walk, is not the only officer within the Texas Guard who is angered at President Bush. At least a dozen commanders, some of them still within the guard, are mad over the lack of adequate funding and essential training. They blame former Texas Governor Bush and his successor, Rick Perry. Burkett had been hired to fix those failings. But he never got the chance. He was brought into the Texas Guard by recommendations from former Republican Governor Bill Clements and Jim Francis, one of the president's closest friends and most prolific fund-raisers. Burkett's job was to develop a plan to make the guard's training and equipment more relevant to modern missions against enemies like terrorists. His years of work and recommendations, however, were never implemented and the governor is said to have turned down millions of dollars in federal money to pay for improvements when it was offered by the Clinton administration.

No one understood the decision to not upgrade the guard until Bush ran for president. In his first policy speech, given at the Citadel, candidate Bush told the assembled cadets, "If the commander-in-chief were today call upon all of our armed forces to defend America, at least one full division would be unable to answer that call." The only "full division" that was incapacitated at the time of that speech was the Texas National Guard. The governor of Texas is the only governor in the country who has command of a full division. It struck Texas Guard commanders then, even some who supported Bush, that they had been used as a political ploy and their lousy training and equipment was part of a plan. Burkett's complaints, and those of others, had already resulted in a Texas legislative investigation. Nothing changed, though, and a few years later stories of "ghost soldiers," men kept on rosters after they had quit in order maintain federal funding, began to leak into the media. Burkett also related the purging incident to USA Today but the paper's editors failed to publish it until my book was released in early 2004.

The disgust over all of this may have reached its flashpoint this summer when the Texas 56th Brigade Combat Team was called to active duty and sent to Iraq. The grumblings were the same. Not enough armored equipment. Outdated weaponry. No tactical training relevant to the conflict. An insufficient amount of body armor. One former officer threatened to hold a news conference and confront Mr. Bush and the governor of Texas. A president, who had avoided combat in Vietnam by getting into the guard and then had walked away four years into a six year hitch, was sending them into a deadly war without training or appropriate weaponry. Their anger was understandable.

The emotion was further exacerbated by political context. The same president that had avoided combat was allowing his re-election campaign to attack a candidate who had volunteered to go to the war, a man who had shed blood and had been awarded medals. Even Texas Guard soldiers that follow orders, regardless of the politics of their commanders, had now reached the end of their tolerance. And at least one of these individuals was probably angry enough to manufacture documents. The men accusing Kerry were using lies to destroy his military reputation and ruin his candidacy so why not use lies to fight back? It was faulty and dangerous rationale, if it were deployed. And it has frightening implications for American democracy.

Burkett gets named as the primary suspect because of his profile. When his friend George Conn failed to confirm the file purging story for the Boston Globe, a number of journalists tended to discredit everything Burkett said. Conn, who works as a civilian employee of the U.S. Army in Germany, has college age children and a wife who reportedly works for a large Republican law firm in Dallas, could have reasonably been expected to choose his family over Burkett. Burkett told me he understood Conn's actions and probably would have done the same thing. The White House, meanwhile, is working very diligently on connecting the CBS Killian memos, if they are fabrications, to Burkett. Strategically, the political intent is transparent: he's discredited so if the memos are his they are also discredited. Burkett's personal medical files were leaked to reporters and it is now public knowledge that he had a nervous breakdown while fighting the virus he contracted in Panama. One skeptic has suggested that the use of the term "billet" in one of the documents is telling because it is an Army and not an Air Force term and Burkett's background is not Air National Guard. And, of course, there is the Kinko's fax.

If Burkett is suspect, though, so is Karl Rove. Admittedly, this is a five-cushion bank shot if it does involve Rove. But such things are no longer considered impossible when looking at his political machinations. Every campaign he runs seems to have well-timed distractions. In 2000, just before his inarticulate client was to debate Al Gore, a tape of Mr. Bush's training ended up in the Gore campaign's mailbox. Reporters wrote about this discovery and overwhelmed issues and debate coverage with the unraveling mystery. An employee of Mark McKinnon, Bush's media expert, was later implicated in the scandal but nobody ever proved Rove wasn't pulling strings. Of course, it was strictly coincidental when Rove's office was found bugged in 1986, the day of a critical debate between another one of his inarticulate candidates and an incumbent governor. That mystery overwhelmed debate coverage and implicated the democratic opponent. I remember standing with other reporters outside of Rove's building after his news conference to announce the revelation he was bugged. We all laughed about how amateurish it all appeared. And then we realized he had us because we had to report it straight; not the way we perceived the facts. When the FBI file was finally made public, it showed the bug on Rove's wall had a battery with a life span of only six hours and just 15 minutes of it had been expended. Rove did it. But there are probably too many people who would have had to have been in on the fraud for him to make phony documents surface in CBS's hands.

So, Rove, it turns out, might just be both lucky and good. His deceptive behavior through the years, involving everything from Swift Boat veterans to faux environmental groups made up of Bush donors, is not a sufficient rationale for others to enter lying into the political process. Nothing is. But that appears to be what has resulted from the persistent string of lies about the president's time in the National Guard, should the CBS memos be proven false. Some of the good guys may not be the good guys any more. They may have become like their enemies. And in the process, they gave Rove what he needs to win. There is truth, however, in the fake memos. Witnesses, including commander Killian's secretary, have said Lt. Bush defied an order to take his flight physical. The White House has not refuted what is in the memos. It has only attacked the legitimacy of the documents themselves. Republican congressional leaders, who asked no questions about faulty intelligence leading to the war with Iraq, are suddenly demanding investigations and hearings on the failings of CBS. Burkett told the Washington Post to not be so confident the Killian memos were forgeries. What does he know that he isn't saying? Yet. Is it possible they are flawed transcriptions of real memos and the originals are being protected? And how would he know? Or does he know?

This has all worked very well for the Bush campaign. Reporters worried about the veracity of the Killian memos have not yet asked the president if he failed to obey a direct order to take his physical. And that's a fair question, regardless of who wrote the Killian documents. Lt. Bush missed a physical and there has never been an explanation beyond Dan Bartlett's lame argument of "formality." This most glaring lie in the president's resume, his time in the Texas Air National Guard, avoids intelligent scrutiny because memos raising the issue appear dubious.

The bonus for Rove is that Dan Rather is enduring greater evaluation than the President of the United States. The CBS anchor, who rode to the top of his profession on the crest of great national events like Hurricane Carla, the Kennedy assassination, the Civil Rights Movement, Vietnam, and Watergate, has long been vilified by the right. If Rather and his talented producer Mary Mapes did not bring proper skepticism to their analysis of the documents, they will likely pay a dear professional price. And John Kerry, who ran a positive convention and ignored the Swift Boat attacks while the GOP spat vitriol, can also be expected to pay a price for bad advice and a lack of political diligence. No toll, however, has ever been exacted on the life and political career of George W. Bush. The magnitude of his lies and mistakes far outweighs any possible transgression by CBS or those who might have fabricated the Killian memos. If they get caught, they suffer. Mr. Bush has been proved both wrong and deceptive and has danced into a lead in the polls through our collective American delusion. We punish the anchorman and praise the president.

CBS and Rather may have to admit mistakes. And then make corrections. Why don't we demand the same thing of our president? Maybe there are no big lies and small lies. There are just lies. And they all must be atoned for. We know the ones that belong to George W. Bush. And if we don't hold him accountable, eventually, we the people will end up paying for his debts and his sins.

Dear God,

Please don't let The Democrats realize how the "It Was Rove" meme goes down with The Electorate ... please, please, please let them keep it up. Oh, and while you're at it, could you please see that Tuh-RAY-zaah gets lots more opportunity to interact with the press? That'd be really cool too. Thanks.


Oh, yeah ...

Amen.

oh and god, please don't invoke the 'truth' as a requirement for electioneering. it would destroy the current 2-party system in america.
Oh, yeah--

pass the beans.

Here's some conspiracy theory stuff to sugarcoat ...













Be sure to remove the implausible, if predictable, denials before consuming.

Oh, and do keep the phrase "Sugarcoat" in mind ... I expect its gonna be comin' up again real soon ... a lot.

why would the electorate ever consider anything other than the fact of kerry and thereza hovering over the quivering mortal coil of clinton, forcing him to produce forged documents for delivery straight into the hands of dan rather. just to bring down "this president".

Gosh, there's so much to talk about, but I think I'll just post a cartoon instead:

Just watched Lockart tell a reporter it was The Whitehouse that had to answer questions, not himself or the the Kerry Campaign, or The DNC. He seemed affronted and incensed the reporter reacted with some skepticism.

It's just now getting good, the media can't control the info anymore. Hopefully this keep everyone more honest down the road......okay I'm dreaming.

Oh, its gonna get gooder yet.



Meanwhile, over at Kerry's official campaign website, there a Press Release from April 27th that reads like an outline for their now thoroughly busted attempt to smear Bush the Younger"


And then there's this, which seems to have slipped under most folks' radar ... though its likely to get a little more notice in the near future:


Stay tuned, kids, the fun has barely started.

Oh, and there's This Bit of DNC Silliness, and then there's the DNC email plea for funds for the legal challenge to the November elections ...


Meltdown.

Did Roger Stone provide forged documents?
New York Post
9/21/04

The hot rumor in New York political circles has Roger Stone, the longtime GOP activist, as the source for Dan Rather's dubious Texas Air National Guard "memos."

The irony would be delicious, since Rather became famous confronting President Nixon, in whose service a very young Stone became associated with political "dirty tricks."

Reached at his Florida home, Stone had no comment.
----------------------------------------------------

Roger J. Stone, Jr.

Roger J. Stone, Jr. is a long-time Republican dirty-tricks operative who led the mob that shut down the Miami-Dade County recount and helped make George W. Bush president in 2000. He was also a campaign strategist during the presidential campaigns of Presidents Nixon, Reagan and George Herbert Walker Bush. He is the chairman of the Fort Hill Group, a Washington, D.C.-based public affairs firm.

Stone was also a strategist for the 1981 and 1985 campaigns for governor of New Jersey by Thomas H. Kean, who was later appointed by President Bush to chair the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States (also known as the 9-11 Commission). [1]

During the 2004 presidential primary, Stone served as a behind-the-scenes consultant to black firebrand Al Sharpton's campaign to win the Democratic Party nomination, prompting speculation that Sharpton's campaign was actually a stealth operation to weaken the party's chances of winning in the general election. Writing in the Village Voice, Wayne Barrett noted that Stone was "financing, staffing, and orchestrating the presidential campaign of Reverend Al Sharpton. ... Sharpton has a little-noticed history of Republican machinations inconsistent with his fiery rhetoric. ... [A]ny Sharpton-connected outrage against the party could either lower black turnout in several key close states, or move votes to Bush." [2]

The New York Times has also reported on the strange-bedfellows relationship between Stone and Sharpton, noting that Stone was behind several of Sharpton's most visible campaign tactics, including scrutiny of primary candidate Howard Dean's record of minority appointees when he was governor of Vermont. [3]

External links

Michael Slackman, "Sharpton's Bid Aided by an Unlikely Source," New York Times, January 25, 2004.
Wayne Barrett, "Sleeping With the GOP," Village Voice, February 5, 2004.
Glen Ford and Peter Gamble, "The Problem with Al Sharpton," The Black Commentator, February 5, 2004.
Wayne Barrett, "A Dirty Trickster's Bush Bonanza," Village Voice, April 19, 2004.
Roger J. Stone, Jr., "The Edge of Tom Kean," Philadelphia Inquirer, April 21, 2004.

Bush and his cronies have a stellar history of these types of dirty tricks. Why is it any surprise to neoconservatives that Rove and his ilk would pull this kind of shite off?

Given that this election is the dirtiest and nastiest I've ever seen to date, why believe ANYTHING?!?

The lack of objectivity from neoconservatives is stunning, as usual...

Sharpton campaign backed by 'dirty tricks' Republican
Sharpton campaign backed by 'dirty tricks' Republican
By Charles Laurence in New York
(Filed: 15/02/2004)

The Rev Al Sharpton, the New York rabble-rouser who is contesting the race for the Democratic presidential nomination, is being subsidised by a Right-wing Republican campaign consultant notorious for "dirty tricks".

The 49-year-old preacher, who has no church or stipend of his own, has been living in a $6,000 (£3,200)-a-month Helmsley Carlton Hotel apartment on Madison Avenue in Manhattan and running up $3,000 to $7,000 bills for stays of no more than a few days each in hotels while on the road. His organisation, the Harlem-based National Action Network (Nan), has received at least $250,000 in loans.

The funds, and the services of a new campaign manager, have been provided by Roger Stone, a businessman and Republican political consultant from Miami.

The disclosure has outraged black leaders and Democrats generally. "It turns out that the Left-wing preacher is being subsidised by the sleaziest Right-wing consultant," said Jack Newfield, a black New York columnist. "It's a Marx Brothers parody of the Hitler-Stalin pact."

Glen Ford, an analyst for Black Commentator, a political magazine, said: "Sharpton has long been known as an influence trader. This time, he got eaten whole. Al Sharpton finds himself - through his own moral and character flaws - the poor captive of Roger Stone, a rich, cynical misanthrope who pummels democracy for sport."

Mr Sharpton, however, claims that his attackers are racists - a defence he has used repeatedly since 1987, when he first became notorious for backing a black teenager who falsely accused white police officers of rape and abduction.

"I can speak to whoever I want to. I am sick of these racist double standards," he said in a statement. He has acknowledged that his organisation received the money from Mr Stone.

Mr Sharpton has floundered in the campaign, winning only 10 per cent of the vote even in the South Carolina primary, where almost one in three voters was black. He has continued, however, to mount attacks on other Democratic candidates and has refused to pull out of the race.

Mr Stone made headlines during the hotly disputed 2000 presidential election when he led the mob that stormed and briefly shut down a Florida ballot recount before the Supreme Court ruled in favour of President George W Bush.

He cut his political teeth by infiltrating the 1972 Democratic campaign of Sen George McGovern, who lost in a landslide to President Richard Nixon.

In 1988 he helped to devise a notorious Republican advertisement that baited the Democratic challenger Michael Dukakis for granting parole to a black rapist and murderer, Willie Horton - killing his campaign and securing President Bush Snr's election.

Mr Stone is reported to have said that he "would have some fun with Sharpton's campaign", saying that he and the preacher shared "a mutual obsession: we both hate the Democratic Party".

He has also said that he wants to groom Mr Sharpton - who as one of America's most visible black activists was reputed to be the model for the rabble-rousing politician the Rev Bacon in Tom Wolfe's satire, Bonfire of the Vanities - to run as an independent against Hillary Clinton if she campaigns for the presidency in 2008.

Investigations by the New York Times and the New York weekly the Village Voice established that Mr Stone poured money and expertise into Mr Sharpton's unlikely bid for the nomination. He loaned at least $270,000 to Nan and another $50,000 to Mr Sharpton's presidential campaign. Nan was also allowed to run up $15,000 on Mr Stone's credit card.

Friends and associates of Mr Stone then helped to raise enough campaign contributions from around America to entitle Mr Sharpton to receive up to $500,000 in federal matching funds. Mr Stone sent Charles Halloran, a political consultant, to New York to run the Sharpton campaign. The two men were behind Mr Sharpton's damaging disclosure early in the campaign that Howard Dean, then the front-runner, had not appointed a single black or Hispanic to his cabinet while governor of Vermont. Mr Stone told the New York Times that the idea had been his and Mr Halloran had researched the facts.

Stone gets his OKs from Karl Rove
It should be noted that Stone gets his dirty tricks OKs from Karl Rove, who controls all things Republican.

BBB

Yeah ... that's it! Go for it! Get it ... c'mon, you can get it it! Yeah! Chase it! Don't let it get away ... you've almost got it! Just a little more ... keep goin' ...

How Roger Stone destroyed the Reform Party in 2000 campaign
How GOP operative Roger Stone destroyed the Reform Party in the 2000 presidential campaign

The Sex Scandal That Put Bush in the White House
by Wayne Barrett with special reporting by Jessie Singer
May 18th, 2004 10:00 AM
The Village Voice

Pat Buchanan is on the tube again, co-hosting a Crossfire facsimile on MSNBC. Just a celebrity commentator now, he changed the face of American politics in 2000?-unnoticed by a recount-focused media. First, he seized control of the most successful third party in half a century, the Reform Party, whose founder, Ross Perot, cost Bush I the presidency in 1992. Once Buchanan became the party's presidential nominee, he mysteriously disappeared, getting 2.4 million votes less than Ralph Nader, 80,000 less in Florida alone. The Buchanan saga remains important not only because it reveals the seamy underside of Bush II's ascent to power, but because it shows how the GOP virtually eliminated a national centrist party that could've altered the 2004 race.

Alive now in only seven states, the party's remnants just offered their ballot line to Nader, which could also wind up benefiting Bush. The saga begins with a baby, allegedly born more than four decades ago. Incredibly, just as Bush backers in 2000 used an illegitimate-child scandal in South Carolina to smear John McCain, longtime Republican dirty-tricks operative Roger Stone was simultaneously using just such a scandal to undermine Buchanan.

Stone, who also spearheaded the pro-Bush mob shutdown of the Miami/Dade recount in 2000, says now that he "has no specific recollection" of strategically employing the Buchanan baby story. But a Voice investigation reveals that he pushed it aggressively on reporters early in the 2000 campaign, then just let it hover over Buchanan, who was nose-diving so badly toward November that no explicit threat of a scandal story was even needed.

"Everyone who worked for Nixon knew about" the alleged Buchanan baby, says Stone, adding that he "lived with it through two Reagan campaigns." Stone and Buchanan were aides to Nixon and Reagan, and Stone, also a Bush I campaign veteran, was rewarded for his subterranean 2000 efforts with an appointment to the Department of Interior transition team, which he parlayed into a multimillion dollar business as an Indian gaming consultant (see Voice, April 19).

The Stone-inspired Reform infighting served multiple Bush interests: It killed any possibility of a third Perot run, blocked the candidacy of former Connecticut governor Lowell Weicker, and forced out the party's only elected official, Minnesota governor Jesse Ventura. Buchanan's vanishing act?-after Stone cajoled him to run Reform?-left nearly a dozen party leaders contacted by the Voice convinced that he and Stone were conscious agents of doom.

The trail starts in June 1999 at a lunch at The Palm in Washington. Bay Buchanan, the sister who ran all three of Buchanan's presidential runs, brought her mentor from the Reagan days, Lyn Nofziger, to a lunch requested by Stone, the scheme-a-day consultant who used to rent her his summer beach home. The Buchanans had already started another Republican run, but "it was Roger's brilliant idea," recalls Nofziger, "that Pat ought to leave the party and become the candidate of the Reform Party." Stone talked about the $13 million in automatic federal matching funds that came with the Reform nomination and "said he knew what to do to get it," says Nofziger.

Stone also began talking to William Von Raab, the customs commissioner under Reagan who'd been co-finance chair of the 1992 Buchanan campaign. Stone had already recruited Von Raab as a partner in a small Washington-based lobbying and consulting firm, Ikon Holdings, that listed Stone as its president and Von Raab as its chairman. "Roger asked me if I wanted to go to the Reform convention in July and try to promote a Buchanan candidacy," Von Raab recalls. Stone told Von Raab that Donald Trump, Stone's longtime top client, was thinking about seeking the Reform line and that Von Raab's efforts for Buchanan would help Stone "see what the makeup of the convention was."

Incredibly, Von Raab says, his "Buchanan hospitality suite" at the Dearborn, Michigan, convention hotel?-with soda and hamburgers and occasional champagne?-"was paid for by Roger, who, in turn, said he was covering it with Trump's money." Stone insists the suite was not just for Buchanan, but for "a committee seeking an alternative" to Perot?-a contention Von Raab dismisses. News stories noted that Von Raab was also circulating flyers attacking Weicker that Stone takes credit for now.

At the same time, Michael Niebauer, a New York Independence Party activist tied to the Reform Party, who arrived in a rented Trumpmobile, says he collected campaign posters from Stone, set up a Trump hospitality suite at Stone's behest, and met secretly with Stone in his hotel war room. "Stone asked me not to say anything. He didn't want his presence known," says Niebauer.

Buchanan, who says he did not know about Von Raab's ties to Stone, did well in an unofficial convention tally, but decided to continue on the Republican primary trail. He was demolished, though, in the August 14 Iowa straw poll, coming in behind Gary Bauer. The next day, Washington pollster Robert Schroth started doing a poll for Stone that showed Buchanan running strongly on the Reform line. Bay Buchanan says Stone sent her the results, which he also dropped in a September news story. Schroth would later do another poll for Stone trumpeting Trump, who, like Buchanan, announced on October 25 that he was changing his registration to Reform and seeking the party's nod.

Buchanan says that when he ran for president in 1992, 1996, and 2000, he was dogged by "an unsubstantiated rumor" that he had an illegitimate child while a Georgetown undergrad between 1957 and 1961. "I don't know who ginned it up," says Buchanan. "Do I have suspicions? Sure. Reporters realized these people were doing something to damage me and decided not to write it. The same kind of thing was used against McCain." But in the 2000 campaign, a new allegation was added to the tale that made it more damaging and more likely to see print. Ex-aides were telling reporters that Buchanan had made payments to the mother to kill the story. One reputed 1992 money trail, albeit perfectly legal, involved an intricate chain of personal checks?-from Buchanan to his sister to an aide, who then delivered cashier checks to a Washington lawyer. Asked about the child and these payments, Pat Buchanan told the Voice: "I'm not going to go into that. I don't know the details of anything. It deals with a private matter. We did nothing wrong."

Bay Buchanan, who goes further than her brother and calls the baby allegation "false," concedes that in fact she did "make some payments," delivered by an aide, to the lawyer "because Pat was out of town campaigning for 10 weeks" in New Hampshire and elsewhere in early 1992. She says Pat either prepaid or "reimbursed" her and that she "thinks" the lawyer had "done some legal work for Pat." She confirmed that the lawyer was once married to a woman Pat had dated during his Georgetown years. Saying that "our opponents were pushing" the story "every time we did well," Bay Buchanan said she had not heard Stone's name associated with it, but knew "people close to Roger" were. Stone minced no words when asked about the charges: "There's no doubt this illegitimate child story is true. My understanding is that Buchanan supported the child and made educational payments. It would be honorable."

But Stone also cited "a controversy about hush money," contending that a top Buchanan aide, Scott Mackenzie, "quit because of it." Reporters in fact contacted Mackenzie in 1999 shortly after Stone discussed the Buchanan issues with him. "I have no specific memory of being one of the people who suggested this story to reporters," insists Stone now, "but this is widely known information and it's not inconceivable that someone did." Stone recalled that the story was "heavily peddled in 1996 by Phil Gramm's people," referring to the former Texas senator who was running against Buchanan that February. Stone's longtime partner Charles Black was running Gramm's campaign and concedes it "did come up," though he says he told the staff not to answer press questions about it. John Weaver, however, another top Gramm aide, says he "got reports that phone calls were being made" by the campaign. Black also concedes that he "heard about it in 1992," when he was running the Bush I campaign, but says he got it from a reporter whose name he could not recall, and that he "shut down" the Bush staff "from discussing it." Black says he doesn't "remember discussing it with Roger," but "wouldn't be surprised" if Stone was circulating it.

After Gramm dropped out in 1996, "the Dole campaign was trying to tar and feather Buchanan with allegations of a love child," says Keith Appell, a Buchanan spokesman then. A top Dole official told the Voice that Stone, who was unofficially advising the campaign, began "talking about planting the story" after Buchanan won New Hampshire and other early contests. "Roger was in touch directly or through someone else with the woman," said the official. "He would find out about it unsolicited and bring it to you. But he said the woman went cold." While Stone can't recall such efforts, he says he did hear about a second round of payments that year.

Both Buchanans say that the Washington Post's E.J. Dionne was the first reporter to chase the story at the beginning of 1992 (Dionne said he does not discuss stories he did not write). A week before Buchanan's 37 percent showing against a sitting Bush president in New Hampshire, Bay Buchanan asked Mackenzie to bring the 4 a.m. edition of the Post to her house. Relieved that no story about the child appeared, Buchanan, who says now that "the Bush campaign was pushing it," told aides about her fears. Within days, an aide was asked to make the deliveries to the lawyer?-in five $10,000 chunks between February and April. The Buchanans also confirmed that Associated Press reporter John Solomon "was on the story" in late 1999 and early 2000, just as Trump and Stone were in mortal combat with Buchanan. Jay Townsend and Stephen Marks, two ex-Buchanan staffers, recalled being questioned about the child by AP reporters. Ex-AP reporter Jonathan Salant remembers looking "at all the Buchanan campaign filings to see if there were any funny payments" that might be connected to a child cover-up. Bay Buchanan, who talked to Solomon "at length," says he pressed her about the payments.

While Solomon will not discuss Stone's possible role in the story, Mattie Lolavar, a consultant with the Lichfield Group who was then on retainer for Stone, says he actively worked at "planting the story in 1999." Lolavar says she talked to and e-mailed Solomon at Stone's behest. While Stone blasts Lolavar as a "biased source" because she is now suing him in a breach of contract dispute, every reporter she initially identified as having ever been on the story was independently confirmed.

In addition to Dionne and Solomon, Lolavar said the Star's Richard Gooding, who broke the Dick Morris sex scandal, was contacted by an aide working for her. While Gooding would not confirm the source, he said he was tipped to the story and chased it unsuccessfully. Lolavar also said Insight, a publication of The Washington Times, talked to her about it, and a reporter there said he called Lolavar on a tip "via a third party who made it clear to us that this was a story Stone was pushing." Stone, says Lolavar, "kept telling me it's coming out Monday, it's coming out Friday," but Solomon eventually told her his sources "clammed up." Lolavar says Stone proudly told her that, beyond the press outreach, he "got a union to put flyers under the hotel doors" of Reform officials at one party meeting that said: "Ask Pat about the kid."

Lolavar could not specify when that pink and blue flyer might have been distributed, but party officials like press secretary Donna Donavan and ex vice-chair Patricia Benjamin recall it. Bay Buchanan says: "I remember getting a call or two saying this stuff was out there." Stone says "if there was a flyer, it wasn't from Roger Stone." By mid February, with the story in limbo, Trump quit the race and Buchanan's Pat Choate became party chair. Choate now says the Trump/Stone operation was "a Republican dirty trick," designed "to disgust people and drive them away from the Reform Party. They were doing everything in their power to make a mess. You had Ventura leaving and Trump all over TV saying that Buchanan loved Hitler, ignorant statements." Bay Buchanan, who stopped talking to Stone during the campaign, says she still "doesn't understand why he would want us in the Reform Party in the first place" and then assail Buchanan as a Nazi.

This circus ended any possibility of Perot belatedly entering the race?-always a major Bush concern. Russell Verney, the first national chair of the party and Perot's closest ally in it, says Buchanan launched a state-by-state delegate war, purging the Perot leadership "to make sure Perot didn't come in." Bay Buchanan agrees, saying an unusual party rule would've permitted a last-minute convention switch to Perot. The bloody battle led to a convention walkout, legal challenges that cost Buchanan ballot status in states like Michigan, and a Perot endorsement of Bush. Buchanan says he just "played out the hand" after that. He raised $7.1 million before his nomination and less than half a million afterward. He handpicked a John Birch Society vice-presidential candidate who'd claimed workers compensation for a mental disorder. He dumped $10 million of his matching funds into an invisible media buy by a Texas company that did mattress commercials. In the final week he spent two days in Alaska. He went from blasting Bush as "the Prince of Wales," unequipped for the presidency, to declaring after the election: "I'm glad we didn't take Bush down with us." He assured the Voice that he did in fact vote for himself, adding: "It didn't make any difference in Virginia."

Buchanan adamantly rejects any notion that the implicit threat of the child story had anything to do with what even old friends like Lyn Nofziger see now as his "nonexistent" campaign. "If you've got Roger trying to smear me," says Buchanan, referring to the Voice findings, "it had no influence over what I did. I wasn't intimidated into backing off the campaign by anyone or anything." Indeed, with Buchanan "staying out of the way of the Bush campaign in the battleground states," as Verney put it, the child story needed no pre-November revival. It had only ever surfaced when Buchanan did well, and aides like Townsend say he trimmed his sails in those races as well. Stone told Von Raab that his Buchanan maneuvers were a "tactical exercise"?-an accurate description of his ironic orchestration of Al Sharpton's campaign this year. The master of convoluted chaos, double agent Stone has left his mark in the dark alleys of presidential politics since Watergate, but the sacking of the Reform Party may be his lasting legacy.