Fake Memo?

As Washington Prowler reported It's Rathergate all over again, and the same vigilant entities that brought about to the collapse of CBS News could now also cause heads to roll among Democratic Senate leadership staffers and further shame multiple news organizations that would appear to have fallen for another document hoax.

Very quietly, Senate Republican leadership aides to both Sen. Rick Santorum and Sen. Mitch McConnell, as well as the Senate Republican Policy Committee, have been using the Senate recess break to reconstruct the purported distribution of a document that media outlets, including ABC News, the New York Times and a number of regional newspapers, identified as Senate "GOP talking points" on the Terri Schiavo fight that unfolded over the weekend. "There is a process here for documents like this that are passed around down on the Senate floor, which is where the media claimed that the 'talking points' were being distributed last Thursday," says a Republican policy committee staffer. "There was a lot of stuff going on Thursday, but a document like this one was not being distributed. As far as we know, the only documents being handed out related to votes on a series of amendments being pushed through before the recess. Schiavo wasn't part of that package."

Beginning over the weekend, when doubts about the document first appeared on the blogosphere, the document's provenance began to unspool. Conservative blogs Powerline, In the Agora, and Fishkite all have been out front on the story. A number of blogs found language almost identical to the "talking points" on a post at the Traditional Values Coalition website. ABC News then posted the language of the purported document but not the actual document itself.

Powerline has the actual memo here, and has written about it here, here, here, here, and here.

The Washington Post said In a memo distributed only to Republican senators and ABC News said the same thing. But the New York Times admitted As tensions festered among Republicans, Democratic aides passed out an unsigned one-page memorandum that they said had been distributed to Senate Republicans. "This is an important moral issue and the pro-life base will be excited that the Senate is debating this important issue," the memorandum said. Dr. Frist and other Republicans denied having seen the memorandum, and Dr. Frist said he "condemned it as soon as I heard about it."

At the time I am posting this, the post on In The Agora has been updated 8 times, and has 7 TrackBacks, and has 15 comments. There will probably be more by the time you read it.

Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ) is calling for an investigation into the memo's origins. I support that call, because I suspect that it will revewal that Democratic staffers launched this as a Dirty Trick. MemoGate took down Dan Rather and a number of others at CBS. Will TalkingPointsGate take down the Washington Post and ABC News, as well as a number of other Democrats?

Update 3/26 7:30pm It now appears the fake memo was written by a staffer of Democratic Minority Leader Harry Reid