re: #120 Charles Johnson

I don’t think so, because if they were planted, whoever did it would have tried harder to conceal it. It wouldn’t have been hard to dig up a manual typewriter to create the docs, and then we might never have known.

You don’t plant fake documents that are so easy to spot. It still amazes me that no one in the CBS News editorial chain ever picked up on the fact that no typewriter could do that.

A couple years back I wrote up a blog post with my own made-up conspiracy theory of how those fake documents came to be. Like all good CT’s its semi-plausible..

I think the Rathergate memos were illegally obtained documents that were scanned and saved as Microsoft Word documents using optical character recognition software. I think it happened during the early months of the Clinton administration when the FBI files of GOP leaders went missing for months and then mysteriously reappeared and were returned. Its hard to imagine those files were simply misplaced and no one in the Clinton White House rummaged through them.

Whether the goal was to use the secret documents to sway elections or just to sell them for cash, it was a simple plan poorly executed. They couldn’t make paper copies of all the documents. It would be too risky sneaking around with stacks of paper. Just ask Sandy Berger about that.. So they scanned the juiciest pages and saved them to files. But the boneheads saved the scanned documents as .doc files, not as .jpg images. Probably the default setting on the OCR software package they used.