Fred Barnes, co-founder and executive editor of conservative journal The Weekly Standard and a FOX News Channel host, attempted to defend President George W. Bush's disputed service in the Texas Air National Guard. During an exchange on the August 17 edition of FOX News Channel's Special Report with Brit Hume, Barnes claimed that Bush's “pay stubs” and “copious records” released by the Bush-Cheney '04 campaign as well as the Pentagon “show that he did show up” for duty in Alabama in late 1972 and early 1973.

However, the military records made public thus far do not conclusively show that Bush fulfilled his National Guard service. It was precisely that failure to resolve the issue through releasing the records that prompted the Associated Press to file a lawsuit against the Air Force and the Pentagon on June 22 to “compel access to a microfilm copy of the military personnel file of President George W. Bush.”

From the August 17 edition of FOX News Channel's Special Report with Brit Hume:

BARNES: The truth is there's a lot of evidence that Bush did show up in Alabama. He obviously missed some meetings. They didn't have anything for him to do much, so there were pay stubs that year when he was in -- no, maybe it was less than a year -- when he was in Alabama and was officially assigned to the Air National Guard in Alabama. I mean the notion on that -- the scandal on that was first touched off with Terry McAuliffe, the Democratic National chairman, said Bush was AWOL. Well, he wasn't AWOL. And he, as people do in the National Guard, he did apparently miss some meetings. But copious records have been turned out by the Bush campaign, the ones from the Pentagon and so on, that show that he did show up.

Barnes's comment about the “copious records” was apparently a reference to the more than 300 pages of Bush's military records released by the White House on February 13 -- documents that, according to a February 14 article in The Boston Globe, “add virtually no new information about Bush's stint in the Texas Air National Guard that concluded with a final year of sporadic duty and an early return in 1973 to civilian life.” As Media Matters for America noted on April 29, numerous media sources reported that the military records the administration released in February did not prove that Bush fulfilled his National Guard service.

As for Bush's pay stubs, the Pentagon announced July 23 -- after declaring them destroyed two weeks earlier -- that Bush's “microfilm payroll records were found in a Denver facility,” according to a Reuters article. However, as the article noted, the “two faded computerized payroll sheets” released by the Pentagon showed only that “Bush was not paid during the latter part of 1972” and “offered no new evidence to dispel charges by Democrats that he [Bush] was absent without leave.”