I guess I'm behind on this, because this afternoon Politico reported that Desmogblog received the documents yesterday (2/14) and "The blog posted them about an hour later without contacting the Heartland Institute for confirmation."
http://dyn.politico.com/printstory.cfm?uuid=5826D160-4705-4D72-A0BB-44C8C2EDA7DC
So they received them after the suspicious memo was scanned (according to its metadata). Which doesn't prove its not fake, but at least the timeline isn't inconsistent.
4 comments:
Dave, this was posted by a commenter at Desmog:
I would like to give an advise for checking the authenticity of the PDF in question.
This method should work if the person used a major public email service like Google or Yahoo.
The person who has the original email should download it with some client like Outlook or Thunderbird (but not The Bat, which has a buggy export) and post it as an .eml file - with headers and all.
The crucial part of the email is the DKIM signature. It is added by all major servers and it verifies not only the body of the email, but also the attachments and the main headers. There are several online DKIM verification forms, so verifying should not be a problem. If it passes verification, then it was indeed sent out from HI.
So now, having had a chance to digest some of the material, I have to ask exactly what the inconsistencies are between the factual information in the memo vs. what's known from the rest of the material or otherwise. There's not one that I can see. Thus, it appears that the entire claim is damage control with regard to those two damning phrases.
Does it really make sense that the leaker would have just made those up? It wouldn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that the distraction of a forgery claim wouldn't be worth it, given that the substantive material in the documents is more than enough to get major attention. Occam's Razor suggests something else is going on here.
Maybe the memo was a draft?
That someone then borrowed and scanned.
Draft seems possible. I imagine that a document of this sort could be under more or less continuous revision.
Note that HI continues to lie, as it's what they do and they just can't stop, as we see in this fresh email posted by Kate Sheppard:
"It does not express Heartland's goals, plans, or tactics. It contains several obvious and gross misstatements of fact."
Um, except that everything of substance in the "fake" is confirmed by the remaining documents. What exactly are those "obvious and gross misstatements of fact"? They don't say.
They're just desperate to separate themselves from that damning phrasing, and so will avoid even mentioning it since doing so immediately raises the question of why a forger would think it was a good idea to create an otherwise-accurate document merely to add those words.
It's amazing how liberal journos and bloggers allowed themselves to be distracted by such a transparent ploy.
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