McCain Camp Slams NBC Report It Endorsed Earlier In Day

Buckle up, because this one is pretty incredible -- and if my hunch is right, it's all an attempt to distract attention from McCain's apparent theft of Alexandr Solzhenitsyn's "Cross in the Dirt" story.

It starts with McCain campaign manager Rick Davis, who has now sent an angry letter to NBC News chief Steve Capus whining about Andrea Mitchell's performance on Meet The Press earlier today. Here's the Mitchell quote that Davis cites in his letter:

ANDREA MITCHELL: The Obama people must feel that he didn't do quite as well as they might have wanted to in that context, because what they are putting out privately is that McCain may not have been in the cone of silence and may have had some ability to overhear what the questions were to Obama. He seemed so well-prepared.

But earlier in the day, McCain Deputy Communications Director Michael Goldfarb used those exact same words as evidence for this point:

The Obama campaign, shocked that John McCain would have the temerity to upstage their celebrity candidate on national television, is now struggling to find an explanation. According to Andrea Mitchell's reporting earlier today on Meet the Press, the only explanation the Obama campaign could come up with was foul play.

Moreover, as I pointed out earlier, Goldfarb's own post confirmed the suspicions of Mitchell's sources. And as Nate Silver points out, the Rick Davis letter provides even more evidence confirming the basic allegation -- that McCain wasn't in the cone of silence and therefore had the capacity to gain advanced warning.

(Update: The New York Times also confirms it -- McCain was not in the cone of silence. As debrazza noted, the McCain campaign's stunning defense is that McCain is a POW.)

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So the big question is why in the world would the McCain campaign send out a letter attacking Andrea Mitchell for making a statement that only hours earlier they had used to attack Barack Obama, especially when both the letter and the earlier statement confirmed the concerns of Mitchell's sources?

I think the answer is Alexandr Solzhenitsyn's "Cross in the dirt" story -- the same story that John McCain seems to have stolen from Solzhenitsyn, perhaps with the help of Mark Salter.

The McCain camp would rather fight a battle over the cone of silence -- even if they lose -- than to fight over whether or not McCain was telling the truth when he relayed that story.

That's what makes the most sense to me: I think this is a big distraction. They want to create a storm over this issue and then hope that Obama quickly picks a VP, thereby burying questions over McCain's theft of Solzhenitsyn's "Cross in the dirt" story.

Hopefully Obama isn't planning on picking his VP until later in the week -- I'd like to see how these stories play out first, and there'd be nothing better than Obama making his VP pick while John McCain is on the ropes.

Original here