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Now You See It, Now You Don't

This morning we posted that a CBS News report had the following quote that was obviously quite troubling to the Cheney administration:

CBS News White House correspondent Peter Maer reports Texas authorities are complaining that the Secret Service barred them from speaking to Cheney after the incident. Kenedy County Texas Sheriffs Lt. Juan Guzman said deputies first learned of the shooting when an ambulance was called.

The Secret Service is looking into how the case was handled at the scene, Maer added.

Cheney was attending routine briefings Monday at the White House.

"It's clearly an accident, but the fact that the White House didn't release this information, that it sat around for almost a day is, in itself, bizarre," Time magazine's Matt Cooper told CBS News' The Early Show. "Late-night comics are going to be all over it. You know, these things — fairly or unfairly — tend to become a metaphor for a presidency and don't be surprised if you see lots of jokes about the vice president was trigger happy, or he might have had better aim if he'd served in Vietnam."

As Mimi Shaeffer notes in the comments, the entire section has now been scrubbed from the CBS story.

It isn't just us -- Dave Johnson, Talk Left, The Blue Voice, Think Progress and others also has the same quote and the same link.

CBS got some 'splainin to do.

Maybe someone over at the CBS News Blog can get to the bottom of this.

Update: Madam_Deb finds a different version of the story on another CBS URL -- it contains the first Maer quote but the rest (including the shot by Cooper) is still scrubbed, in favor of this quote:

But the Secret Service told a different story, saying agents had informed the local sheriff of the shooting about an hour after it happened and that the vice president had been interviewed about the accident by local authorities on Sunday morning, CBS News White House correspondent Bill Plante reports.

So they didn't interview Dick until Sunday morning. Long past any time that they could have ascertained whether he had been drinking or not. Sounds like the "investigation" by the Sherrif's department that indicated there was "no alcohol, or misconduct involved in the incident" is just a cheap coat of supposition based on nothing.

posted by Jane Hamsher @ 2/13/2006 06:55:00 PM