I wasn't specifically aware that it was for things like lunch receipts, but it was the kind of thing I suspected. Because there's so much information out there that is available, I asked myself what they could possibly be looking for. The truth, it seems to me, is that they're looking for the kinds of things that can be easily hidden in the accounting. And the things that can be easily hidden in the accounting are moneys that move around in ways that....
I mean, I've been there. I've done it. Frankly, I've moved money around myself where I thought, you know, if someone else saw this, they wouldn't necessarily understand what I was doing. For instance, if I'm overseas covering an event and someone says you can only pay cash for something specific, I pay cash, and there's no receipt for that. I have to come back and explain that to my bosses.
I think if someone were to look at that without knowing exactly what happened and how it happened, they'd ask a few questions: Where did that money come from? Where did that money go? How come there's no receipt?
I think this sort of thing happens all the time in news coverage. I think there are all kinds of expenditures that would be very hard to explain. I think it's those expenditures that are hard to explain, where one could easily point fingers and say, you know, look at what these guys were doing; they have no explanation for this.
I had covered the war in Bosnia, and there were Croatian groups that claimed the Serbian government paid for my trip over. All I could say was no, that didn't happen. But it didn't stop a media frenzy from saying that my trip was paid for by the Serbian government.