At his news conference, McCain said he knew nothing of a meeting between Iseman and Weaver.
In his e-mail to the Tribune, Weaver said, "I did not inform Senator McCain that I asked for a meeting with Ms. Iseman." But Weaver did not respond to a follow-up query about whether he told McCain about the meeting after it occurred.
Weaver, who left McCain's campaign when it was foundering last summer, said he still strongly supports McCain.
"From the moment I left the campaign until today, not one day - not one - has gone by that I haven't reactively or proactively talked with the campaign leadership, with state leadership about the campaign and how to win. To suggest anything else is wrong, a lie and meant to do nothing but harm," he said.
The Times' article had been rumored for weeks to be in the works and the online Drudge Report had reported Dec. 20 that McCain had hired Robert Bennett, a well-connected Democratic lawyer, to help him deal with the Times as it reported the story.
The Times editorial page has endorsed McCain for the Republican nomination, but McCain allies said the long incubation of an article that did not deliver either an admission of an affair or proof of one suggested an agenda to discredit McCain, the presumptive GOP presidential standard-bearer.
"They knew they didn't have a story and something provoked them to run a story they didn't believe in," said McCain senior adviser Charles Black. "This is a story of gossip and rumor-mongering, which is wrong, which is phony and which doesn't meet appropriate journalistic standards."
Bennett derided the article as "a big piece of cotton candy. When you bite into it, there's not much there."
Times Editor Bill Keller stood by the article.
"On the substance, we think the story speaks for itself," Keller said in a statement. "On the timing, our policy is, we publish stories when they are ready. `Ready' means the facts have been nailed down to our satisfaction, the subjects have all been given a full and fair chance to respond, and the reporting has been written up with all the proper context and caveats. This story was no exception. It was a long time in the works. It reached my desk late Tuesday afternoon. After a final edit and a routine check by our lawyers, we published it."
McCain officials challenged the accuracy of key aspects of the article, including assertions that the staff banned Iseman from McCain's office because she was hanging around all the time.
"There was only one staffer who had the authority or the ability to do that, and that was me," said Mark Salter, McCain's longtime chief of staff. "And I never did anything of the kind because I had no reason to."
McCain's lone remaining rival for the GOP nomination, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, declined to try to reap political gains from the story.
"I have gotten to know Senator McCain over the past 14 months," Huckabee told reporters in Houston. "Senator McCain emphatically denied an improper relationship this morning at a news conference. ... I only know him to be a man of integrity. Today he denied any of that was true. I take him at his word."
Jill Zuckman and Andrew Zajac write for the Chicago Tribune.
