What Did John Kerry Know, and When Did He Know It?

Now that the "60 Minutes" documents have been outed (most likely) as forgeries, the blogosphere and some old media are searching for their source. The American Spectator's The Prowler has a new story on the matter, but it has crashed this morning because of a Drudge Link (which Michelle Malkin calls a "Drudgealanche," as when she had 178,632 visits when her site was linked to Drudge).

Via Power Line, the Daily Recycler has the cache version of a story.

The Prowler, who was tipped off by a producer at CBS News and has also communicated with a Democratic National Committee staffer, says that the documents originated from the DNC and the Kerry campaign more than six weeks ago. Supposedly they were given to an opposition research staffer at the DNC by a "retired military officer," but the provenance of the documents cannot be proved.

Says the Prowler: "According to a DNC staffer, the documents were seen by both senior staff members at the DNC, as well as the Kerry campaign. 'More than a couple people heard about the papers,' says the DNC staffer. 'I've heard that they ended up with the Kerry campaign, for them to decide to how to proceed, and presumably they were handed over to 60 Minutes, which used them the other night. But I know this much. When there was discussion here, there were doubts raised about their authenticity.'"

And he carries this damning admission from his CBS source:

"The CBS producer said that some alarms bells went off last week when the signatures and initials of Killian on the documents in hand did not match up with other documents available on the public record, but producers chose to move ahead with the story. 'This was too hot not to push. If there were doubts, those people didn't show it,' says the producer, who works on a rival CBS News program.

"Now, the producer says, there is growing concern inside the building on 57th Street that they may have been suckered by the Kerry campaign. 'There is a school of thought here that the Kerry people dumped this in our laps, figuring we'd do the heavy lifting on the story. That maybe they had doubts about these documents but hoped we'd get more information,' says the producer. 'If that's the case, then we're bigger fools than we already appear to be judging by all the chatter about how these documents could be forgeries.'"

So now comes the question: What did John Kerry know, and when did he know it? Were his troops engaged in dirty tricks -- handing over suspicious documents to a sympathetic network to damage the opposition -- with or without his knowledge?

Clark Clifford once called Ronald Reagan an "amiable dunce." Are we to understand that John Kerry, whose mind is so nuanced that he can't articulate a consistent position on the war, was our decade's amiable dunce? Let the research continue.