FOXNews

Did Al Gore Try to Steal the Election?

This partial transcript of Special Report with Brit Hume, May 7, 2001, was provided by the Federal Document Clearing House.

BRIT HUME, HOST: To this day, talk of it inflames passions, especially on the left, where to many the idea of George W. Bush as a legitimate president will never be accepted. I'm speaking, of course, of the Florida recount. One reporter who was down there when it all unfolded and stayed on afterwards to write a book about how this election was decided is Fox News contributor Bill Sammon, White House correspondent of The Washington Times. His book is out now. It's called At Any Cost. He joins me here now.

Hi, Bill.

BILL SAMMON, AT ANY COST AUTHOR: Hi.

HUME: Subtitle of your book is, How Al Gore Tried to Steal the Election.

SAMMON: Yeah.

HUME: Strong words, man! Can you back them up?

SAMMON: It's funny because, initially, this was the working title we kicked around when I first decided to do the book. And I said to the publisher at that time, "You know, that's a little incendiary. That's a little loaded. Let's -- let's water it down." He said, "Fine." When I did the manuscript, spent a few months actually writing the book, I came back to him and said, "Can we change it back to `Steal the Election'?" because I felt I could back it up. And I think I can.

HUME: Well, how? I mean, how do you say "steal the election"?

SAMMON: Well, I mean...

HUME: I mean, here's a -- let me just -- let me posit a couple things.

SAMMON: OK.

HUME: He lost the election by an impossibly close margin. One recount was automatic. It was such a narrow margin that a few hundred votes either way somewhere could have turned it. It's hard to blame him for trying. What was so illegitimate about it?

SAMMON: Well, I mean, first of all, the word "steal" means something. I actually looked it up, and I also -- a politically loaded word, but it actually means to take someone else's possession, especially by unjust means. Clearly, the 25 electoral votes were Bush's political possessions in that he won every single count.

So the default position was he had them. To get them, Gore resorted to, I think, unjust means, most of which we've seen -- trying to disenfranchise military voters who were casting ballots from overseas, trying to disenfranchise civilians who were living in Seminole and Martin Counties, 20,000 people who didn't do anything wrong. Gore embraced lawsuits to throw their votes out, personally directing a smear-and-destroy campaign against Katherine Harris.

HUME: What about that? I mean, we've -- we all know that some of his spokesmen and others, Democrats, were very harsh in their criticism of Katherine Harris. Some in the media joined in and with really quite sharp descriptions of her physical...

SAMMON: Yes.

HUME: ... appearance. Why do we associate that with Al Gore?

SAMMON: Well, in fact -- and -- and I will say right off -- out of the gate that my book is not the only book to say that Gore himself personally directed this. This is -- you know, this is a guy who talked about, you know, not wanting to go to the "politics of personal destruction." He instructed his press secretary, Chris Lehane, and one of his top aides, Mark Fabiani, to make sure the press realized that -- that Katherine Harris was a Bush partisan. And they very clumsily carried this out. You know, almost within a matter of hours, you had them talking about how she was a Soviet commissar. You had Alan Dershowitz, a Gore booster, saying that she was a crook on television. And the press picked up on this with amazing efficiency. You had columnists...

HUME: Right.

SAMMON: ... coming saying her make-up was applied...

HUME: Right.

SAMMON: ... with a trowel, as if that had anything to do with the way she...

HUME: Of course -- of course, bad-mouthing her could not by itself turn a single vote. What are actions that you would say he took that -- on the Martin County, Seminole -- he never formally joined either of those cases.

SAMMON: He -- he openly and publicly embraced those cases...

HUME: Right.

SAMMON: ... at a time when he had been saying -- his mantra was "Count every vote."

HUME: Right.

SAMMON: His entire strategy was to count every vote. But when he got desperate, he said, "You know what? Maybe we should embrace these lawsuits, which say throw out 20,000 votes." Also, I -- you know, one of the things I did in the book was I tracked down a guy who actually volunteered to help rescue the USS Cole, which had been struck by a terrorist bomb in the Middle East.

And while he was out there risking his life to -- to actually get into a Yemeni tugboat and push the Cole away from a very dangerous situation, back in Jacksonville, they were throwing his ballot out. Why? Because it didn't have a postmark.

The ostensible logic is that, well, if it didn't have a postmark, the guy might have mailed it after the election. But his ballot arrived, like so many others, the day before the election and was stamped as having arrived before that. And yet the Gore lawyers threw it out. And in fact, they high-fived each other after disqualifying more than a thousand ballots, many of them from that county.

HUME: All right, and what else?

SAMMON: Well, I mean, you know, another thing is, you know, Bob Beckel, who was a Democratic operative, managed Walter Mondale's campaign in 1984, as we all know, he tried to flip electors...

HUME: Right.

SAMMON: ... from Bush to Gore. Gore distanced himself from that effort, saying, "Well, I won't accept anybody" -- but in reality, he had retained an Electoral College expert to advise him on the possibility of flipping faithless electors.

HUME: Wow!

SAMMON: So there was some hypocrisy there.

HUME: The book, folks, is called At Any Cost: How Al Gore Tried to Steal the Election. You've had just a small taste of what's in it. Bill Sammon, Fox News contributor and the White House correspondent of The Washington Times, is the author.

Thanks, Bill, for being here. Good luck with it.

-- Anonymous, May 08, 2001