President Bush Is Not Disputing The Substance Of The Killian Memos

Via Andy Williams Affleck, in a White House press briefing today, President Bush's press secretary Scott Mclellan responded to a question about the Killian memos as follows:

Question: Scott, on the National Guard documents on "60 Minutes," the First Lady says she believes these are forgeries. The RNC has accused the Democratic Party of being the source of these documents. Knowing then what you know now, would you still have released those documents when you did?

Answer: Well, that's a hypothetical question, John. We received those documents from a major news organization. We had every reason to believe that they were authentic at that time. And in keeping with the spirit of releasing documents and being open about all the documents that we have, we made those documents available to everybody else so you could look at them yourselves. Since that time there have been a number of questions that have been raised about these documents and their authenticity. There continue to be questions raised. Those are serious issues; they ought to be looked into fully.

Allow me to repeat, re-emphasize, and interpret: the White House believed the documents to be authentic. Now, if George W. Bush knew that the facts as stated in those memos were false and known to be false by Colonel Killian, it stands to reason that the White House would have had no reason to believe that the documents were authentic. The White House would have known for a fact that they were forgeries. From McLellan's statement of the exact opposite, that the White House believed them to be authentic, we can conclude therefore that George W. Bush was either not consulted by his staff about this, or that he did not tell them that he knew they had to be forgeries, or that the whole thing was a GOP sting operation to embarass CBS news and the Kerry campaign. The former scenario is completely outside the realm of belief, ergo it is one of the latter two.

Now, let's also look at what Laura Bush said on the radio in Iowa on Monday:

You know, they probably are altered, and they probably are forgeries, and I think that's terrible, really. That's actually one of the risks you take when you run for public office or when you're in the public eye.

Probably??? So Laura Bush is not sure that they're forgeries??? Her husband hasn't told her that they have to be forgeries because the facts stated in the memos are wrong and Colonel Killian would therefore not have written them?

The whole question of whether or not the Killian memos are forgeries is moot. The White House has told us this much. The White House has told us that they might be authentic, ergo George W. Bush believes that the facts as described in the memos are consistent with what Colonel Killian believed to be true. Up until now, George W. Bush has steadfastly claimed that he did not use family influence to garner his National Guard assignment, to bypass hundreds of other candidates for commission as a pilot trainee, or to exit the Guard early, and that he met all requirements of his service. Now, neither his wife nor his press secretary can definitively state that Colonel Killian would have disagreed with that assessment of his service.

Case closed.