According to Liberty University President Jerry Falwell Jr., disgruntled former board members and employees have started a “criminal” smear campaign against him. He will ask the FBI to investigate the matter.
On Tuesday, Jerry Falwell Jr. told the Associated Press that his opponents have “improperly shared emails belonging to the university with reporters in an attempt to discredit him.” He added that the campaign against him is basically a coup. The reason he’s targeted, or so he says? His ardent support for President Trump.
“I’m not going to dignify the lies that were reported yesterday with a response, but I am going to the authorities and I am going to civil court,” Falwell Jr. said about a report in Politico that accused him of using Liberty University to improperly benefit himself and his family. “We’re not educating; we’re buying real estate every year and taking students’ money to do it,” an anonymous official told the left-wing news outlet. Another current high-level employee said about Liberty University that “it’s a dictatorship. Nobody craps at the university without Jerry’s approval.”
As PJ Media’s own Tyler O’Neill explained yesterday, “Liberty has flourished under the younger Falwell. When he took over in 2007, the school listed $259 million in assets on its most recent IRS Form 990. By the June 2017 filing, its assets had surpassed $2.5 billion. That number has increased to more than $3 billion.”
Although that would normally be good news in the eyes of board members and employees, that’s not the case here because, they say, “Falwell used that massive wealth to benefit himself and his family.”
That’s all nonsense, Falwell now tells the Associated Press. And those who leaked emails containing, in their eyes, damaging information about Falwell are breaking the law. Or something.
“Liberty owns every single one of those emails. It’s our property. They were working for us when they used our server. And our policies make it clear every email sent on our server is owned by Liberty and if anybody shares it with anybody outside Liberty, it is theft. And so that’s the underlying crime,” Falwell says.
That’s why he has contacted the FBI. He demands a criminal investigation.
However, there’s one minor problem. As cybercrime expert Nick Akerman explains to the AP, it is “totally insane” to claim that there’s a criminal conspiracy going on here. The former board members and employees who shared the emails are perfectly within their rights to do so, assuming they didn’t hack anyone’s accounts to obtain them.
It goes to show just how seriously Jerry Falwell Jr. has lost it. To a) blame this on his support for Trump and b) then to call on the FBI to investigate the sharing of emails with a reporter is ludicrous. This is about corruption, not about whether or not conservative Christians can support Trump. In fact, it’s likely that most if not all of those leakers also support the president. After all, Trump’s approval ratings among Republicans and especially among white Evangelicals have always been, and remain, high.
Perhaps Falwell should look at himself and how he runs Liberty University. That’s what this is about.
His “they hate me because I support Trump” excuse does not only make no sense whatsoever, it’s also extremely weak, childish and cowardly. This is about Jerry, not about Trump.
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