WASHINGTON – A document expert retained by CBS News for the disputed “60 Minutes” story on President Bush’s National Guard record said Tuesday that she warned that the memos involved “had problems” and that she questioned “whether they were produced on a computer.”
Asked whether CBS had taken her concerns seriously, Linda James, a forensic document examiner in Texas, told The Washington Post: “Evidently not.”
A second document expert, Emily Will, told ABC News correspondent Brian Ross that she had cautioned CBS in writing that there were “significant” problems with the documents, which were used in a “60 Minutes” broadcast last Wednesday as evidence that Bush received favorable treatment while he was in the Texas Air National Guard.
“I told them that all the questions I was asking them on Tuesday night, they were going to be asked by hundreds of other document examiners on Thursday if they ran that story,” Will told ABC. A third document consultant, Marcel Matley, told the Post on Monday that although he vouched for the signature of Bush’s former squadron commander, the late Lt. Col. Jerry Killian, there was “no way” he could authenticate Killian’s purported memos because they were copies.
CBS News Senior Vice President Betsy West said Tuesday night: “As far as I know, Linda James raised no objections. She said she’d have to see more documents to render a judgment.”
As for Will’s account, West said: “I’m not aware of any substantive objection she raised. Emily Will did not urge us to hold the story. She was not adamant in any way. At one point, she raised a concern about a superscript ‘th,’ which we then discussed with the other experts we hired to examine all four of the documents we aired. We were assured the ‘th’ was consistent with technology at the time, an assessment that has since been backed up by other experts.”
CBS spokeswoman Sandy Genelius added that both women “played a peripheral role and deferred to another expert,” Matley. But James said she did not defer to Matley and merely recommended him to CBS. The network says it relied on two additional document experts, whose names have not been made public.
The accounts by Will and James add to the mounting questions about whether the 1972 and 1973 memos reported by CBS could have been produced on a Vietnam War-era typewriter. This is the first time that people involved in the process have said they raised warning flags about the memos, whose authenticity has been doubted by the president’s wife, Laura, and some outside document experts.
Meanwhile, Killian’s former secretary, 86-year-old Marian Carr Knox, also questioned the documents in an interview with The Dallas Morning News.
“These are not real,” Knox said in a story posted Tuesday on the newspaper’s Web site. “They’re not what I typed, and I would have typed them for him.”
Knox told the newspaper she did not recall typing the memos, but that they echoed Killian’s views on Bush. Killian died in 1984.
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