Yuku free message boards

Warren: McCain did not violate 'cone of silence'

(CNN) - Sometimes you just have to take it on faith.

Pastor Rick Warren said John McCain didn't hear any of the questions in advance at Saturday night's Civil Forum, even if the candidate was a little late arriving to the pre-arranged quiet room or "cone of silence."

At the beginning of the forum at California megachurch, Warren told the crowd and TV audience, "I'm going to ask identical questions to each of these candidates, so you can compare apples to apples. Now, Senator Obama is going to go first. We flipped a coin, and we have safely placed Senator McCain in a cone of silence."

But at 8 p.m. ET, as Warren said that, McCain was actually not in the building. He was just leaving his hotel, with his motorcade arriving at the church nearly a half hour into the event. A. Larry Ross, a spokesman for Warren, says McCain then went directly into the holding room they dubbed the "cone of silence" (in reality, a room with no TV or audio).

Some questioned whether that late arrival might have allowed McCain to hear some of the questions being first posed to Obama.

Warren told CNN Sunday evening, "we flat out asked him" if he heard any of the questions. The McCain campaign "confirmed that McCain did not hear or see any of the broadcast" in the motorcade or after he arrived, Ross said.

When asked if McCain overheard anything, Charlie Black, a McCain adviser who was with him at the time, told CNN: "We were in motorcade until 5:30 p.m. ET; then a holding room in another building with no TV."

Warren said, "I trust the integrity of both" candidates, and said he "knew they would abide by the rules." He joked McCain may not have been in the cone of silence, but "he was in the cone of a Secret Service motorcade".

Ross says the whole event only came about because of the relationship Warren has with both men. He said they all agreed to assure a "level field, "McCain would not hear the questions or Senator Obama's answers." The pastor spoke to each candidate this week, giving the general themes. Warren decided to tell them each the first two questions in advance, about the three wisest people you know, and the biggest moral failings.

For their part, an Obama spokesperson told CNN's Mike Roselli they are not pursuing whether McCain heard any of the other questions. They say they assuming McCain had the same information they did.

In addition, according to Ross, Obama knew a third specific question that Warren would ask - the one about a "president's emergency plan for adoption." "[Warren] felt that since that was basically asking for a commitment, he felt that it was fair to tell them in advance that he was going to ask them that," Ross told me. So Warren told Obama, and planned to tell McCain when McCain arrived at Saddleback, but wasn't able to because of other distractions. So according to what Ross told me, Obama actually knew one more question in advance than did McCain.

As far as the McCain side is concerned, I spoke to Charlie Black a few minutes ago. He told me McCain's motorcade left his hotel at 5 p.m. Saturday - that's the time Obama went on stage at Saddleback. Black told me the trip took 35 minutes, and that McCain was in the car with the Secret Service guys, Sen. Lindsey Graham, and press aide Brooke Buchanan. (Black was in another car.) Black says that McCain did not hear any of Warren's questions or Obama's answers during the car ride. Then: "We arrived at Saddleback and went into a holding room, which is a separate building from the main church. In the room there were four or five staff people, plus McCain, and there was no TV, no audio, no nothing. We talked through a few of the topics. We had spent time in the afternoon preparing, doing Q&A, and we did a few more questions to warm him up. At about ten til six, the advance guys came to get McCain to take him to the stage, because the handshake with Obama was a few minutes before 6 p.m. McCain never heard any of this stuff."

Black confirmed that Warren had given McCain the opening questions, plus the broad themes, earlier in the week. "Other than what we knew from [Warren]," Black continued, "you didn't have to be a genius to know that we were going to get asked about life, marriage, personal faith, staffing for faith-based organizations - a log of things we prepared him for didn't come up, but a lot of them we anticipated."

The bottom line is that Black, and others in the campaign, absolutely deny that McCain heard any of Obama's answers or had any advance knowledge beyond what Rick Warren had given him. "Why would we need to do that?" Black asked me. "We had him prepared, and in any given situation, McCain is going to use his own instincts and give his own answers. It was like a town hall meeting, and Rick Warren was the only person in the meeting."

"I'm sorry the Obama campaign is whining about having a bad night," Black concluded, "but it wasn't because we knew anything they didn't."