Remember Memo-gate? Remember that three CBS staffers were asked to go quietly into that dark night?

Well, they're still there! New York Observer reporter Joe Hagan talked about their story with Democracy Now!

An excerpt (conducting the interview are Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzalez):

JUAN GONZALEZ: Joe, welcome, and let's start off. Can't CBS supposedly just fire these folks instead of seeking their resignations, and what is the situation in terms of why they cannot, why they have been able to stay in the job?

JOE HAGAN: Well, first of all, asking them to resign is a kind of a legal technique which puts them in a position of not being able to talk, basically. As long as they're employed, if they go into the public and begin to tell things they know, then they will be -- they could be sued. So they have to be fired in order to ever say anything. And CBS can just not fire them, and just let their contracts run out. And meanwhile, they're in the position where they can’t even sue, because they're employees of the company right now. So, they have got them in a bind. Meanwhile, the staffers are very angry, because they had their reputations destroyed by this whole event, but also, they have intimated, through back channels, that they have all kinds of information that was not in the report that implicates the top management at CBS in the stonewalling of the event, and also they question the report itself and how it was assembled, and who it was assembled by, by the way. And--

AMY GOODMAN: What do you mean?

JOE HAGAN: Richard Thornburgh being a Bush family friend seems like less an independent report a more like penance--

AMY GOODMAN: Former Attorney General.

JOE HAGAN: Richard Thornburgh, right? who CBS commissioned to do this, is a friend of the Bush family. Why is he actually, you know, an independent operator here to find out what happened, right?