Tag: Jason Leopold

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.

The Return of Jason Leopold

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.

Show Me the E-Mail

Henry Hanks sent me a link to a lengthy response from Salon.Com regarding freelance journalist Jason Leopold’s longwinded article claiming his story about Thomas White is indeed accurate that that he’s the subject of some New York Times/Salon.Com pro-Bush cabal. On the one hand, Salon.Com’s editors deserve some credit for being honest about their own bungling. On the other hand, well, they certainly are world class bunglers.

Leopold’s story included a lot of claims, but in the end it was the fact that Leopold claimed to have dug up an e-mail showing White ordering Enron insiders to cover up losses that separated his stories from other stories about White. Here was a smoking gun against White, courtesy of journalist Leopold.

The scary thing is, however, that Salon.Com did almost nothing to verify that the e-mail was genuine. They simple took Leopold’s word for it,

Our initial review of Leopold’s White story included detailed verification of many of the documents Leopold alludes to relating to Enron Energy Services’ Lilly and Quaker Oats deals. Nothing in our review then or thereafter has raised questions about the authenticity of those documents or the accuracy of Leopold’s reporting of them.

However, no Salon editor actually saw, before publication, the e-mail mentioned in the story — purportedly from Thomas White to a colleague, reading “Close a bigger deal. Hide the loss before the 1Q.” We recognize now that this was a mistake, and we regret it.

Even that German magazine that fell for the Hitler diary hoax at least made sure that there really was some sort of diary before running a story on it. I just can’t believe Salon’s editors didn’t want to see that e-mail.

Anyway when the Financial Times accuses Leopold of plagiarizing seven paragraphs in his Salon.Com story from an FT story, Leopold apparently makes up a story that the FT actually plagiarized from one of his stories. The only problem is that the story Leopold claims he worte for Dow Jones doesn’t seem to exist, and Leopold digs himself in further by claiming that Dow Jones simply purged the story after he left (which the news service denies).

So now Salon’s editors demand to see the e-mail, and find a couple of problems.

As the questions surrounding the Dow Jones story began to multiply, we felt we had no choice but to review every aspect of Leopold’s original story for us, again. It was only at this stage of our investigation, Sept. 20, that Leopold finally provided us with the evidence supporting his story’s account of an e-mail from White. What he provided was a fax of a printout of an e-mail exchange. We noticed immediately that the wording on the e-mail — “Close a bigger deal. Hide the loss before the 1Q” — was different from the wording in Leopold’s story (“Close a bigger deal to hide the loss”). When we published our correction notice concerning the Financial Times plagiarism on Sept. 23, we also corrected that wording, as we continued to investigate the e-mail itself.

The faxed e-mail contained no e-mail addresses or other headers, and that raised our concern, as did a published denial from White in a letter to the New York Times, where columnist Paul Krugman had picked up Leopold’s story. We told Leopold we needed to authenticate the e-mail. He told us the name of his source for it, and Lauerman told Leopold he was going to call the source to verify the e-mail. The source denied ever having spoken to Leopold.

So Salon’s editors finally call Leopold’s source who denies ever talking to Leopold. Leopold tells his editors not to worry since his cell phone records will show he called the source and talked to him. Leopold drags out sending the cell phone records and at one point has someone who supposedly works for his cell phone company join a conference call and list off numbers, dates and times for phone calls. But the numbers the company representative reads off are not the phone numbers to this source. And what happens when Leopold finally sends Salon his cell phone records (emphasis added),

When we reviewed this phone bill early Tuesday it contained numerous calls to the “other source” phone number (the same one the phone-service rep had cited the previous evening), but only one call to the number of the source Leopold originally named as the supplier of the White e-mail. The call was only one minute long, indicating that it was possibly unanswered, and in any case hardly long enough to conduct any sort of interview or obtain a fax of a sensitive e-mail. In any case, the call had taken place five days after Leopold had filed an early draft of the story that already quoted the e-mail.

Now that’s a neat trick — reporting on a source almost a week before actually talking to that individual.

Jason Leopold & Thomas White — The Condensed Version

Glenn Reynolds says he hasn’t been following the whole Jason Leopold, Thomas White, Paul Krugman debacle and links to Leopold’s pathetic defense of his reporting. So, for those wanting to keep score, here’s the brief rundown.

1. Until April 2002, Leopold was a reporter for the Dow Jones Newswires. He claims that he quit to write a book about Enron, but, in fact, he quit right before DJN published the second of a set of corrections to a story Leopold had written about Enron’s executive compensation system.

2. After quitting DJN, Leopold takes to writing stories focusing on whether or not Thomas White — a former Enron executive and current Secretary of the Army — will be forced to resign. These are stories like White Should Go–Now for The Nation and White out? for Salon.Com.

3. In late July, Leopold claims he “hit the jackpot” when a source, former Enron executive Jeff Forbis, gives him highly incriminating e-mail supposedly sent by White to other Enron insiders ordering them to hide losses. Salon.Com runs the story which gets little notice until Paul Krugman also cites the e-mail in a column attacking White.

4. Salon.Com issues a correction noting that seven paragraphs in Leopold’s story were plagiarized from a Financial Times article — inadvertently according to Leopold.

5. Salon.Com pulls Leopold’s article saying that, “we have been unable to independently confirm the authenticity of an e-mail from former Enron executive and current Army Secretary Thomas White that was quoted in the article.”

6. Paul Krugman retracts his use of the alleged White e-mail as well.

7. Leopold writes a long, self-serving defense which claims that the New York Times and Salon.Com are part of some vague conspiracy to protect a Bush administration official. (Because both of those publications are such pro-Bush lapdogs).

Frankly, Leopold is simply not credible. He admits that a) he’s misread Enron documents before, b) he “skirts” the edge of journalism to get his Enron stories, c) the second he saw the e-mail his initial reaction was “jackpot.”

This reads like nothing more than a freelance journalist eager to work his way back into a permanent job who gambled everything on a single sensational and potentially career-making story and, in the process, cut corners and skirted one too many journalistic corner in order to get his story.

Sources:

Web Article Is Removed; Flaws Cited. David Carr, The New York Times, October 4, 2002.

A note from the editors
Why we took down the Tom White story. Salon.Com, October 1, 2002.

White Out? Jason Leopold, Salon.Com, July 15, 2002.

White Should Go — Now. Jason Leopold, The Nation, May 27, 2002.

Salon, Plagiarism, Paul Krugman, and an Unsubstantiated Smear: The strange case of SalonÂ’s Thomas White scoop. National Review Online, October 2, 2002.

Jason Leopold – Shafted By The New York Times. Jason Leopold, Scoop.Co.Nz, October 9, 2002.