This is just too good! The Obama Campaign, in their desperation to explain away John McCain's masterful performance at the Rick Warren "Civil Forum on the Presidency" Saturday night, have allowed their minions in the press to put forth the vile assertion that John McCain cheated by listening in on Obama's time with Rick Warren.

Byron York is now reporting that actually it was Barack Obama who had more information going into the questioning than did John McCain! It turns out that Rick Warren shared a third question with Obama, in addition to the first two he shared with both candidates - a question on adoption that he intended to share with McCain just before the event. But because McCain did not arrive until after the event started, Warren was unable to do so.

The essential claim of the cheating charge is that McCain had more information than did Obama and that is why he did so well. Actually he had less information than did Obama - and still beat the socks off Obama! Priceless!

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."