Buckhead Revealed

I haven’t necessarily bought into the conspiracy theories about the Rovian interest in the allegedly forged CBS documents, but something is rotten in Blogland:

It was the first public allegation that CBS News used forged memos in its report questioning President Bush’s National Guard service — a highly technical explanation posted within hours of airtime citing proportional spacing and font styles.

But it did not come from an expert in typography or typewriter history as some first thought. Instead, it was the work of Harry W. MacDougald, an Atlanta lawyer with strong ties to conservative Republican causes who helped draft the petition urging the Arkansas Supreme Court to disbar President Clinton after the Monica Lewinsky scandal, the Times has found.

The identity of “Buckhead,” a blogger known previously only by his screen name on the site freerepublic.com and lifted to folk hero status in the conservative blogosphere since last week’s posting, is likely to fuel speculation among Democrats that the efforts to discredit the CBS memos were engineered by Republicans eager to undermine reports that Bush received preferential treatment in the National Guard more than 30 years ago.

Republican officials have denied any involvement among those debunking the CBS story.

Reached by telephone today, MacDougald, 46, confirmed that he is Buckhead, but declined to answer questions about his political background or how he knew so much about the CBS documents so fast.

“You can ask the questions but I’m not going to answer them,” he told The Times. “I’m just going to stick to doing no interviews.”

Until The Times identified him by piecing together information from his postings over the past two years, MacDougald had taken pains to remain in the shadows — saying the credit for challenging CBS should remain with the blogosphere as a whole and not one individual.

“Freepers collectively possess more analytical horsepower than the entire news division at CBS,” he wrote in an e-mail, using the slang term for users of the freerepublic site.

MacDougald is a lawyer in the Atlanta office of the Winston-Salem, N.C.-based firm Womble Carlyle Sandridge & Rice and is affiliated with two prominent conservative legal groups, the Federalist Society and the Southeastern Legal Foundation, where he serves on the legal advisory board and has been involved in several high-profile cases.

[…]

MacDougald helped draft the foundation’s petition in 1998 that led to the five-year suspension of Clinton’s Arkansas law license for giving misleading testimony in the Paula Jones sexual harassment case.

And MacDougald assisted in the group’s legal challenge to the campaign finance law sponsored by Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wis.). The challenge, ultimately presented to the U.S. Supreme Court, was funded largely by the Southeastern Legal Foundation in conjunction with Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), the law’s chief critic, and handled by former Clinton investigator Kenneth W. Starr.

[…]

Last week, MacDougald once again plunged into a politically charged controversy — but this time his participation was anonymous.

Operating as “Buckhead,” which is also the name of an upscale Atlanta neighborhood, MacDougald wrote that the memos that CBS’ “60 Minutes” presented on Sept. 8 as being written in the early 1970s by the late Lt. Col Jerry B. Killian were “in a proportionally spaced font, probably Palatino or Times New Roman.”

“The use of proportionally spaced fonts did not come into common use for office memos until the introduction of laser printers, word processing software, and personal computers,” MacDougald wrote on the freerepublic website. “They were not widespread until the mid to late 90’s. Before then, you needed typesetting equipment, and that wasn’t used for personal memos to file. Even the Wang systems that were dominant in the mid 80’s used monospaced fonts.

“I am saying these documents are forgeries, run through a copier for 15 generations to make them look old. This should be pursued aggressively.”

The Sept. 8 late-night posting — written less than four hours after the CBS report was aired — resulted in a flurry of sympathetic testimonials from fellow bloggers, spreading within hours to other sites. The next day, major newspapers such as The Times and the Washington Post began consulting forensic experts and reporting stories that raised similar questions.

[…]

While bloggers and some conservative activists hailed Buckhead as a hero in their longtime efforts to paint the mainstream media as politically biased, some Democrats and even some conservative bloggers have marveled at Buckhead’s detailed knowledge of the memos and wondered whether that suggested a White House conspiracy.

Democratic National Committee Chairman Terry McAuliffe even speculated openly to reporters that the whole thing could have been orchestrated by White House political advisor Karl Rove. The Bush campaign called the allegation “nonsense.”

Using the new laws of journalism and truth, this is all that’s needed as proof that this was a Rovian operation from the get-go. This guy is no expert on typography, and he’s an extremely well connected Republican operative who has worked at the highest level of GOP legal circles. That’s good enough for GOP government work.

This was a Republican dirty trick.