Posted on 06/24/2002 3:08:22 AM PDT by Elkiejg
SLIPPED DISK
No one is buying Terry McAuliffe's story that some innocent Democratic staffer happened upon a computer disk on a street corner that revealed the White House and the Republican Party's assessment of the 2002 elections.
You'll recall, the DNC earlier this month announced that it had obtained through Republican bumbling a computer disk that contained a PowerPoint presentation prepared by Karl Rove, the White House and the RNC, and outlining their evaluation of the fall campaign. It was mildly embarrassing, if only because the presentation took a more cautious approach to certain elections: it didn't predict a sweep of open Senate seats for Republicans, it portrayed negatively GOP hopes to win gubernatorial elections around the country, and it was cautious about House elections.
McAuliffe claimed a Senate Democratic staffer came upon a computer disk somewhere between the White House and the Hay-Adams Hotel. Once the staffer realized what it was, he handed it over to the DNC, which released it to the media with much fanfare.
But, in fact, Republicans now believe there was no disk. They believe after a White House political staffer made the presentation at the Hay-Adams to a group of California Republicans, a Democratic Party sympathizer at the hotel copied the presentation off of the temporary file that was created in the hotel's overhead projection system.
"The presentation was made using a White House laptop and the Hay-Adams projection system. There was no disk, because you can't easily store a full PowerPoint presentation on a disk like that. It's easier just to store it on a hard drive and use the computer," says a White House source. "We know the computer wasn't stolen, so it had to come from somewhere else."
Some in the White House even checked into whether the presentation could have been videotaped by a DNC operative, then re-created by Democrats. "Anyone could redo the PowerPoint presentation, there was nothing special about it," says the source. "The DNC has the same capabilities we do. It would take them a day to do it."
Either option portrays McAuliffe and his DNC elves as more devious and industrious than Republicans might prefer. "But we know we didn't bumble this," says an RNC senior adviser. "The Democrats didn't get this because we were careless. If McAuliffe is so concerned about his party's standing that he felt he had to sneak into one of our meetings for a campaign update, then he can crow about it all he wants. It just makes them look desperate."
HOMELAND LEAKOLOGY
According to White House sources, no one was impressed with Tom Ridge's performance on Capitol Hill last Thursday. "It certainly confirmed in our minds the reasons why we didn't let him testify before. It wasn't good," says a White House policy staffer.
That said, the testimony hasn't dimmed the president's opinion of Ridge or his abilities to master the Homeland Security bureaucracy. While insiders insist that Ridge has not told the president he doesn't want the job, the president isn't considering other names. "If he is, he isn't telling anyone. No big surprise there," says another White House political staffer. "They launched this Homeland plan with a working group of five and it never got leaked. What makes anyone think names of possible Ridge replacements would be leaked?"
So where did the rumor about chief of staff Andrew Card becoming Secretary of Homeland Security come from? White House staffers believe it came from backers of Card who see him as the only counter-balance they have to Karl Rove's influence with the president. "There are some people working here, who do some good work, but who work for the vice president and some others here, who don't see eye to eye with Mr. Rove and others," says the White House policy staffer. >b>"Now that it appears Karen Hughes is losing influence, you see them leaking again, the way it was back under Bush I. But we aren't going to let things get out of hand. It's pretty easy to close up the leaks once you figure out where they are coming from."
On the Leak story - what has happened to the tight group around Bush lately -- we hear daily leaks now. Is this really the result of Hughes leaving -- or is the WH doing this for a reason??
What Republicans would those be?
And who's the 'white house source'?
Sounds more like the whole event was fabricated, disk, presentation, and all.
Sure you can--assuming its less that 1.3M. Or, it could have been on a zip disk.
I bow to your knowledge here - I'm not that savvy about this stuff. Come to think of it, I've seen PP presentations and don't they project directly from the computer?
More likely....it was stolen by someone during a coffee break.
Excellent point!! I still don't buy the scene that some DNC operative just "happened" to find a disk on the sidewalk though - a little far fetched.
Exactly. The connection between the computer and the projection systems does not even have the ability to transfer storable data - it's just voltages that the projector uses to display the image - the only way it would be storable would be to convert it from R-G-B video to standard video that could be recorded on a VCR - but someone at the hotel doing that would be highly unlikely.
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Maybe not. But this kind of stuff often uses the hotel's internal network for piping the data from your laptop to the projector. Anyone, especially an employee, can sniff at many points. Of course, if the hotel is pushing data on microwave links it gets even easier.
From your laptop to the projector + enemy laptop in one easy keystroke :).
Hotels are filled with staff. The staff are usually unionized, and Democratic. Therefore, there is a long list of potential suspects for what you describe.
Here would be the acid test. If the press could find out what "quality" of the presentation the Democrats had, the answer would be clear. Immediately after blockbuster movies appear, pirate editions crop up on tape in the Far East. If the Democrats have the CONTENT of the presentation, but not the QUALITY, then it is clear they did not get a digital copy of the original, but a video copy of the presentation.
The latter answer would point to political spying, so the Washington Post would not touch the story with a ten-foot pole. But the Washington Times could probably get the story.
Congressman Billybob
Sorry to disagree, but there are several high-end systems that do precisely that. The blackhawk switcher is used with high-end presentations and can store hundreds of slides quite easily.
Another possibility is a projector with a smartcard chip in it. I would assume that this is unlikely since you have to purposefully load the slides onto the chip, but the low level of graphics on the presentation I saw lend themselves to a "chip presentation"
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