The Final Bizarre Twist in the Jason Leopold “Karl Rove Indicted” Nonsense

For a very brief moment, disgraced reporter and all-around fabulist Jason Leopold was back in the news in May when he incorrectly reported that White House adviser Karl Rove had been indicted in the Valerie Plame case. Of course, Rove was not indicted in the case, and once again Leopold proved his inability to distinguish his own fantasies from reality.

But apparently along the way Leopold resorted to impersonating other journalists in order to gain access to those involved in the Rove case.

Reporter Joe Lauria recounts how Leopold apparently impersonated him in a call to Rove representative Mark Corallo.

Lauria writes about how he met Leopold three days before Leopold’s big Rove nonsense story. Lauria met with Leopold to discuss the fabulist’s recently publish memoir, News Junkie.

After seeing evidence in a blog account suggesting that someone had called Corallo impresonating Lauria, he writes,

I called Corallo. He confirmed that my name was the one the caller used. Moreover, the return number the caller had given him was off from mine by one digit. Corallo had never been able to reach me to find out it wasn’t I who had called. He said he knew who Leopold was but never talked to him.

. . .

I don’t really know why Leopold may have pretended to be me to Corallo. I can only speculate that he either was trying to get a reaction and thought Corallo would be more likely to respond to a conservative-leaning mainstream paper, or he was trying to get Corallo to acknowledge that Rove had been indicted by bluffing that the Sunday Times had confirmed the story. In fact, Corallo told me that “Joel” told him that he had Fitzgerald’s spokesman on the record about the indictment. He has also said he believes Leopold made up the whole story.

Leopold denies it but, as Lauria notes, this is exactly the sort of behavior that Leopold confesses to in News Junkies,

Except that he has done things like that. His memoir is full of examples. He did break big stories, but he lied to get many of them. He admits lying to the lawyers for Enron executives Jeffrey Skilling and Andrew Fastow, making up stories to get them to spill more beans. “I was hoping to get both sides so paranoid that one was going to implicate the other,” he wrote.