The Washington Post was reportedly approached a couple of weeks ago by a woman claiming that Roy Moore had a sexual relationship with her when she was 15 and got her pregnant. As it turns out, the woman may be working for Project Veritas, the organization behind several spectacular exposes of liberal groups like Planned Parenthood.
If that’s the case, it’s clear that Project Veritas was trying to “sting” the Post by getting them to run the story and then exposing the lie as proof of their bias while discrediting Moore’s real accusers.
It didn’t work.
The Post interviewed 41-year-old Jamie T. Phillips, the woman in question, over a period of two weeks. She claimed she and Moore had a sexual relationship in 1992 when she was 15. Phillips told reporters that Moore got her pregnant and she subsequently got an abortion.
She also alleges that Moore drover her to Mississippi to terminate the pregnancy.
Phillips also reportedly asked on a number of occasions how her testimony would affect Moore in the Alabama special Senate election, that is scheduled to take place on Dec. 12. The Post did not publish Phillips’ testimony and reportedly asked her repeatedly what her motivation was for bringing forth the allegations.
Phillips allegedly wanted a guarantee that Moore would lose the election if she came forward.
Post reporters claim to have seen Phillips entering Project Veritas offices in New York Monday and say her vehicle stayed in the office’s parking lot for over an hour.
“This so-called off-the-record conversation was the essence of a scheme to deceive and embarrass us. The intent by Project Veritas clearly was to publicize the conversation if we fell for the trap. Because of our customary journalistic rigor, we weren’t fooled, and we can’t honor an ‘off-the-record’ agreement that was solicited in maliciously bad faith,” Martin Baron, The Post’s executive editor, told reporters Monday.
What a load of crap. The Post’s “customary journalistic rigor” includes publishing information from anonymous sources that may or may not be true. Indeed, the number of times the Post has had to issue embarrassing corrections or clarifications to stories in the Trump era are too numerous to list.
In this case, Project Veritas chose their actress poorly. She apparently wasn’t credible, even to those predisposed to bury Roy Moore. It’s interesting to speculate whether the Post would have run with the story had she been more credible.
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