FBI Fingers Ad Woman In Tape Caper

The FBI says fingerprints on secret Bush debate preparation materials sent to a Gore campaign adviser belong to a woman who works for George W. Bush's media consultant.

CBS News Correspondent Jim Stewart reports that the woman's fingerprints were found on a videotape of Bush preparing for the upcoming presidential debates, as well as on the package the tape arrived in.

The woman, Yvette Lozano, 30, is employed by Maverick Media, Bush's advertising firm in Austin, Texas.

The FBI is meeting with the Justice Department this afternoon to discuss who has jurisdiction in the case, and whether Lozano should be prosecuted.

Lozano had been captured on a surveillance tape last week mailing a package at an Austin post office. She denied she was mailing the package containing debate materials, insisting she was actually returning a pair of pants for her boss.

An office administrator for Maverick since June 1999, Lozano was fingerprinted Friday and said she asked for the chance to take a lie-detector test, an offer she said the FBI has not responded to. She said she was interviewed voluntarily.

Lozano told the Dallas Morning News the two FBI agents who questioned her offered leniency in exchange for her revealing who "put her up" to sending the debate materials.

She said the agents asked whether the delivery of the tapes was a Bush campaign trick, designed to let the Bush camp cry foul at the eleventh hour and scrub the presidential debates.

Both Lozano and her boss at Maverick, Mark McKinnon, have worked for Democrats in the past, including former Texas Gov. Ann Richards, who was unseated by Gov. Bush.

Mckinnon blasted the FBI for questioning Lozano and compared her predicament to that of Richard Jewell, the falsely accused suspect in the 1996 Atlanta Olympics bombing.

He even produced that package the pants arrived in on an appearance on ABC's Good Morning America.

"She was actually mailing this package right here, or a package in return for this one," McKinnon said. "It was a pair of pants that she mailed to the Gap in exchange for one of another color. It was just a terrible, unfortunate coincidence that she was mailing the pants on the day, which was apparently in the range of days when this other package (containing the tape) was mailed."

The incident began Sept. 13, when Thomas Downey, a former New York congressman helping Gore to prepare for the debates with Bush, received the package. He immediately turned it over to the FBI. The package contained briefing books and a videotape of a mock debate between Bush and Sen. Judd Gregg, R-N.H.

A week later, the Gore campaign suspended a 28-year-old campaign worker, Michael Doyne, for telling a friend the Democrats had a "mole" inside the Bush camp who may have supplied the materials. Gore's aides said Doyne had made the story up.

The Bush campaign has criticized the FBI for not being aggressive enough iits investigation of the Gore campaign's possible role in the incident. Bush spokeswoman Karen Hughes told reporters that authorities should seize computer hard drives from Gore's Nashville, Tenn. campaign headquarters.

Bush aides also suggested that political motives were influencing the bureau's actions. Speaking in Los Angeles on Tuesday, Hughes said the handling of the case "causes us to seriously question whether the FBI is being allowed to do its job and actually investigate or whether someone in Washington is playing politics with this investigation."

Gore spokesman Chris Lehane responded, "We're very, very comfortable having the FBI take up this investigation. For some reason, the Bush campaign does not seem to be very comfortable with the FBI."

Bush himself, asked about the debate material in a television interview, insisted it did not come from his camp. "You know, someone working for me did not send this material," he said on MSNBC.