I happened to be surfing the web recently when I came across an ongoing war of words centering around Left wing web site TruthOut. Among other things, Truthout has had a habit of announcing that Karl Rove has been indicted in the mini-scandal over Valerie Plame, only to have to retract that claim later.
But it was the name of the TruthOut writer that grabbed me — Jason Leopold.
Leopold had his 15 minutes of infamy in 2002 when Salon.Com got suckered into running his lies about former Enron executive and then-Secretary of the Army Thomas White.
Leopold claimed that a source had provided him with a smoking gun — an e-mail that allegedly showed White ordering subordinates to hide losses so Enron’s earnings would appear higher than they were.
Both The Nation and Salon.Com fell for Leopold’s lies, but then things fell apart pretty quickly. First, it turned out that Leopold had left his previous employer, the Dow Jones Newswires, shortly before DJN was forced to print a second set of corrections to an Enron story Leopold had written.
Then it turned out that the smoking gun e-mail was a fabrication. The person Leopold said gave him the e-mail denied ever speaking to Leopold. Moreover, Leopold’s own phone records showed that while he had apparently made a single phone call to the alleged source, that phone call didn’t occur until a week after Leopold had submitted drafts that included the alleged e-mail. Leopold almost certainly fabricated the e-mail and then attempted to generate corroborating evidence after the fact.
(BTW, Salon comes out almost as bad as Leopold in this story — they didn’t bother to ask for a copy of this alleged e-mail until after the story’s veracity was called into question. Leopold then provided them a faxed version which, according to Salon, “contained no e-mail addresses or other headers” and whose content differed from direct quotes from the e-mail in Leopold’s story. But then, what else do you expect from Salon?)
Fast forward four years. What do you do when you’ve thrown away a job with Dow Jones Newservice and then flushed your reputation as a freelancer away with the bogus White story? You become a regular contributor to a site called “Truthout” and come up with more bogus stories like May 13’s Karl Rove Indicted on Charges of Perjury, Lying to Investigators. Truthout demonstrates its own dedication to the truth by failing to put any sort of addendum or note that the story was inaccurate and that Rove had not been indicted at the time the story was written.
Anyway, I ran across the Rove story because of this story at Eric Umanksy’s site. Umansky characterized Leopold as a “fabulist” at which point, according to Umansky, Leopold threatened to sue him. Umansky quotes from an e-mail he says that Leopold wrote him saying,
Unless you can provide documented proof for calling me a ‘fabulist,’ an actual story in which I was accused of making something up out of whole cloth I will take that statement you have written seriously and go out of my way to pursue the proper course of action to have you retract that statement.
But Leopold’s behavior in the stories he wrote for the Dow Jones News Service, Salon and now TruthOut make it difficult to reach a conclusion other than that Leopold is a serial fabulist and a liar.
In fact, Umansky turns up another example of Leopold’s serial fabrications outlined in this Washington Post story. Rowman & Littlefield was all set to publish Umansky’s book, “Off the Record”, but canceled it just a few days before it was to hit the presses. According to The Washington Post,
The publisher acted after receiving a warning letter from one subject’s lawyer . . .
. . .
According to a lengthy press release on the book’s publication from Rowman & Littlefield, a small publisher based in Lanham, Leopold says Steven Maviglio, a former spokesman for then-California Gov. Gray Davis, “confided in me that he might have broken the law by investing in energy companies using inside information.”
Maviglio, who now works for the California legislature, says that Leopold “just got it completely wrong” and that he never “confided” in Leopold. He says his lawyer sent the publisher a letter demanding that the material Maviglio deems defamatory be removed.
Leopold’s explanation, not surprisingly, is to blame his publisher, just as he blamed Salon for not backing the bogus White story. But apparently Leopold’s problems extend well past his inability to get the facts straight. According to the Washington Post,
The release fleshes out a troubled career. Leopold says his grand larceny conviction in 1996 was for stealing compact discs from his employer, a New York music company, and reselling them to record stores. He says he was fired by the Los Angeles Times “for threatening to rip a reporter’s head off.” Leopold says he quit Dow Jones Newswires in a dispute over his beat but later learned the news service was planning to fire him because of a correction to one of his Enron stories: “Seems I got all of the facts wrong.”
What a shock. It speaks volumes about the credibility of Truthout that Leopold is a regular contributor.