Burkett had received publicity in 2000, after making and then retracting a claim that he had been transferred to Panama for refusing "to falsify personnel records of [then-]Governor Bush",Thornburgh-Boccardi report, p. 53. and in February 2004, when he claimed to have knowledge of "scrubbing" of Bush's Texas Air National Guard records. Mapes was "by her own account [aware that] many in the press considered Burkett an 'anti-Bush zealot', his credibility in question".
