Burkett: “I’m just a patsy.”

2:34 pm, 9/20/04

Burkett: "I'm just a patsy."
The plot thickens.

Bill Burkett, in a weekend interview with CBS News Anchor and Correspondent Dan Rather, has acknowledged that he provided the now-disputed documents used in the Sept. 8 "60 Minutes Wednesday" report on President Bush's service in the Texas Air National Guard.

Burkett, a retired National Guard lieutenant colonel, also admits that he deliberately misled the CBS News producer working on the report, giving her a false account of the documents' origins to protect a promise of confidentiality to the actual source.

Burkett originally said he obtained the documents from another former Guardsman. Now he says he got them from a different source whose connection to the documents and identity CBS News has been unable to verify to this point. Burkett's interview will be featured in a full report on tonight's CBS Evening News with Dan Rather (6:30-7:00 p.m., ET/PT).

You've got to be kidding me.

Update: The interview was hardly worth watching. Rather rehashed his "Well, I guess we could've made a mistake, after all!" disclaimer, and in the interview, Burkett inssited he isn't the forger, that he lied about his source because CBS was pressuring him to name a source to verify authenticity, and, I think Burkett said that he thinks the memos are real. Now they're talking about tasers. Pretty lame, Dan.