CREW’s executive director Melanie Sloan, a former federal prosecutor, says she was immediately suspicious, partly because Williams claimed he’d known about Menendez’s misdeeds since 2008 but didn’t come forward until Menendez was running for re-election. Nevertheless, she looked into the allegations. She also passed the tip on to Rhonda Schwartz, the chief of investigative projects for ABC News. Between May and November 2012, Schwartz exchanged numerous emails with the tipster, but he refused to meet or speak with her by phone. This set off alarm bells. “I’m eager to meet you because not only would it be easier to discuss this freely in person,” Schwartz wrote in a late May email, “but frankly I’d also like some assurance that we are not being set up by political opponents of the Senator.”
Williams was also cagey when Schwartz pressed for specifics. And his story was shifty—among other things, the number of prostitutes multiplied, and the tipster began alleging that at least one of them was underage. At one point, several women did come forward claiming they had slept with Menendez for money. But they couldn’t offer any proof of their identity, and Schwartz’s team determined that their stories were not credible.
In fact, neither Schwartz nor Sloan found any credible evidence to support the tipster’s allegations. While Sloan suspected the whole thing was a scam, the claims were serious enough that she turned Williams’s emails over to the FBI and asked the bureau to investigate. Based on his email exchange with the agent assigned to the case, which has been uploaded to the Internet, Williams was only slightly more forthcoming with the FBI than he had been with Schwartz.
“The person clearly wanted a scandal rather than an actual investigation,” Sloan says, “because he wouldn’t talk to anyone.”
The scandal did come, albeit slowly. Five days before the 2012 elections, the conservative news site The Daily Caller ran a story under the ham-fisted headline, “Women: Sen. Bob Menendez paid us for sex in the Dominican Republic.” It hinged on the claims of two anonymous women, who also appeared in video with their faces airbrushed out. According to one ABC executive, the women were among those the network had vetted and found less than credible.
The report barely registered with the mainstream media, which was consumed with Hurricane Sandy, but its claims caught the attention of some conservative operatives. As The New York Times reported last month:
In mid-January, after Mr. Menendez was re-elected, someone posted the entire e-mail conversation between Mr. Williams and the F.B.I. agent, Regino E. Chavez, on an Internet site, disclosing to the public that there had been at least an initial inquiry by law enforcement authorities into the matter. Whoever set up this site carefully arranged it so that his or her identity could not be easily traced.
A Republican Party county organization from New Jersey then gave it another nudge, filing an ethics complaint against Mr. Menendez—based on extensive research of flight manifests—that allow it to conclude the senator had improperly flown on Dr. Melgen’s private plane.
[Ken] Boehm, 63, an ex-county prosecutor and a former Capitol Hill aide to Christopher H. Smith, a prominent Republican New Jersey representative, also decided to dive in….He turned up evidence that Mr. Menendez had intervened with officials at the Commerce and State Departments to ask them to help force the government in the Dominican Republic to honor a contract held by a company Dr. Melgen owns to help conduct security inspections at seaports there….
In other words, partisan players investigating the tipster’s dubious claims ended up finding evidence of real ethical breaches. This created a sticky dilemma for reporters, who now had to untangle two overlapping sets of allegations, one of which was more credible than the other.
The vacuum of evidence has been noted by at least one media critic. It has been acknowledged publicly by the woman who initiated the FBI investigation. It has even been laid out in telling detail by reporters describing the allegations to their audience—and yet the accusations are only given more weight as time goes on. The episode shows how easily scandals are manufactured in the media echo chamber, especially as more partisans enter the fray.
Partisan echo chambers indeed. Your 'twisting' of whats known about Menendez's tastes for underage Dominican hookers reminds me of CJR's treatment of John Edwards a few years back:
Update: The Edwards affair allegations? False and false. Both sides say so.
While denials, of course, don’t necessarily guarantee falsity, in the absence of any real evidence, the alleged affair seems to be one to forget.
Unless, of course, you’re Mickey Kaus. The pundit drags the non-story along today by complaining about e-mails he’s received from readers—which argue that if Matt Drudge, “Arbiter of Truth,” didn’t carry the story, Kaus shouldn’t have, either. Apparently still thirsting for the juicy irony the Edwards allegations failed to provide, Kaus gets defensive by accusing Drudge of the very “low evidentiary threshhold [sic]” for journalistic veracity that Kaus himself exhibited yesterday. And he goes further than judging Drudge: after setting the bar for truth ridiculously low, Kaus today sets the bar for falsity almost impossibly high.
Makes me wonder who the real whores are.
#1 Posted by Mike H, CJR on Mon 4 Mar 2013 at 06:02 PM
This is an example of what Geraldo Rivera speaking at an Investigative Reporters and Editors meeting in Boston called "Investigative Repeating."
The readers of your article might ponder whether a story of alleged influence peddling, for his campaign contributor would make the grade as a report as "news worthy" or whether it might be simply considered "business as usual."
During the Abscam investigation another New Jersey Senator Harrison Williams was convicted on dubious evidence. This is story worth reexamining.
#2 Posted by David Reno, CJR on Wed 6 Mar 2013 at 12:18 PM