Campaign 2000: Tapegate

In the two weeks since a videotape and more than 100 pages of George W. Bush's debate-preparation material landed on the desk of one of Al Gore's closest advisers (who turned them over to the FBI), rumors and fabrications about who was behind the caper have whizzed between the campaigns and the press. The facts have been on holiday. Except at the FBI, where agents have been interviewing the handful of Bush aides who had access to the material. The one senior Bush adviser who hadn't been interviewed as of Saturday afternoon was chief campaign strategist Karl Rove. That fact alone started a torrent of speculation. The storm intensified with reports that the FBI had identified a suspect within the Bush campaign. That cued Austin to counter indignantly with its own unfounded accusation--that the Clinton-Gore Justice Department was leaking lies to sow chaos in the Bush campaign. In Goreland, they were sweating their own scandal. Gore officials suspended a mid-level aide who admitted to ABC News that he had boasted to a friend that the Veep's operation had a mole inside the Bush campaign. The 28-year-old aide insisted he had been joking, and no evidence has surfaced linking him to either the debate prep material or anything else funneled from Austin. The whole circus is all the more silly because FBI investigators are still not sure a federal crime has been committed. The only one they could come up with--theft from a federally financed activity--is such a stretch that it might not apply: it's hard to argue that the papers and tape are valuable enough to trigger the statute, which requires that the stolen material be worth more than $5,000.

--By Jay Carney and John F. Dickerson