NOTE: This is the column which Dan Rather wrote and posted to the CBS.com website regarding the alleged "leak" of the information that a grand jury had been convened to look into Bill Clinton's actions with regard to the Monica Lewinsky scandal.

This was removed from the CBS.com Website on Wednesday morning.

Low Road Politics

Clinton Grand Jury Lead Carefully Orchestrated

By CBS News Anchor Dan Rather
Los Angeles, Aug. 17, 2000

(CBS) For all the talk by both parties and major candidates about keeping this presidential campaign on the high road, it seems low-road politics remain very much in fashion. Once again, we are reminded that with politicians, especially, you need to watch their feet as you listen to their words.

All of which comes to mind in light of the leak revealing that Ken Starr's successor, Independent Counsel Robert Ray, has empaneled (sic) a new grand jury to look at evidence that President Clinton broke the law while giving testimony on his relationship with Monica Lewinsky in the Paula Jones lawsuit.

You don't have to be a cynic to note that this has all the earmarks of a carefully orchestrated, politically motivated leak. The Republican-backed Robert Ray is sponsored by a three-judge panel that must periodically decide whether Ray's investigation should continue. This panel features two federal judges backed by the Jesse Helms wing of the Republican Party.

Any reporter who's spent time on the police beat learns to look for motive. So you ask yourself - what group has the motive to see that such a leak would occur at such a time, hours before Gore is set to accept his party's nomination in the most important speech of his political life?

None of which is to say that George W. Bush is behind the leak, directly or indirectly. We certainly have no information that he is. But candidates themselves hardly every are, as their hands much remain clean and their deniability plausible. (You may want to review some of the more unpleasant tactics used by Bush backers against John McCain in South Carolina earlier this year.)

The Gore campaign, of course, is trying to shrug off this latest maneuver - and may even harbor hopes that the leak will engender a backlash against the Republicans. But well-timed leaks and revelations have recently become especially effective weapons for backroom political strategists because they work. And regardless of backlash, they do plant seeds of doubts about candidates and their parties. Most of us hope and like to think that they don't work. The record indicates otherwise. They do.