That same day, I called Gore’s campaign manager, Bill Daley, and told him that I was going to recuse myself. In both our minds, this was an unpleasant situation. I just said, “Look, no one’s going to believe I hadn’t read this stuff and learned from it, so I’m just going to recuse myself from the campaign.” It was hard to do, because (a) this was my friend running for president, and (b) I had Bush pretty much down by then. But I didn’t talk to Al until, actually, all of the debates were done. And the rest is history.

[Downey then explained that, at the time, Bush said that if he ever saw Downey, he’d like to thank him for doing the right thing.]

Ironically, like, two years later, I’m in Prague. There’s a NATO summit. I’m at a cocktail party and he’s there, and I walk over to him and say, “Well, Mr. President, my name’s Tom Downey. I’ve been waiting two years for that handshake you wanted to give me.” And I thought he wouldn’t have any idea who I was, but he grabs my hand. He was talking to someone from the Czech Republic, someone from Hungary, somebody from Slovakia. Their English was okay, but it wasn’t great. And Bush tells them, “He was me! He was me!” They don’t have a clue what he’s talking about. I was surprised and pleased. Laura was there. He brought her over: “You remember—he did that right thing of turning over the debate tapes.” He was going on and on and on. I thought it was very nice. I said to him, “You know, Mr. President, I spent 70 hours trying to be you.” And he goes, “That must have been boring as hell.”

Berman: Did you recuse yourself from helping Gore because you were worried about the perception that even though you had turned over the material, you still might have used it? Or did you simply feel honor-bound, that it was the right thing to do?

Downey: I thought a little bit of both, to be honest with you. I thought, Look, this is a presidential election. Presidential campaigns should act honorably, even though most politicians are not perceived as being honorable creatures. But that’s because they don’t act honorably. If you act honorably, people have a different attitude about politics. Or, at least, they can expect some version of the truth in a debate without one side having seen the materials of the other.

And then I just had the cold-eyed worldview that some people are going to think, Downey seems like an honorable guy, but I’m sure he read all this stuff, and I’m sure he watched it all. So rather than face that, I basically decided, I’m not going to have anything to do with this campaign.

I knew as soon as I saw the video that my role in the debates was over. A crime has been committed to get it to me. I’m in the process of involving myself in the furtherance of mail fraud. So it really wasn’t a hard decision.

Berman: But by taking that extra step, you’re almost making yourself, or making the Gore campaign, the victim of the crime instead of the Bush campaign. The Gore campaign ends up being disadvantaged, in a sense, because you had to step aside and you couldn’t help anymore.