Deja Dan All Over Again

Reading the legal complaint attached to Dan Rather's $70 million lawsuit against CBS is like being transported in a time machine -- granted, only to the year 2004, but it feels like an eon in news years. As you'll read in my last story on the subject, reported for The New York Observer in 2005, many of the odd details cited in Rather's legal claim have been previously reported. Among them, that Rather had tried to hire his own PI to find the source of the infamous Memogate documents -- to which CBS responded by hiring its own sleuth: Erik Rigler, a former FBI agent who Rather has dubbed "the mystery man." So began my murky journey into West Texas...

EASTLAND, TEX.—Three days before Dan Rather was to retire from the CBS Evening News on March 9, the man who gave him the suspicious memos that precipitated his departure as anchor sat in a Mexican restaurant here, 126 miles west of Dallas...

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