Huff Post’s Ryan Reilly recently had problems telling the difference between earplugs and rubber bullets. He also has long struggled with telling the difference between fact and fiction.
Reilly was recently arrested covering the mob violence in Ferguson, Missouri. He described the loss of his cell phone and communication devices incident to his arrest as “dehumanizing,” which gives you a sense of his priorities I suppose.
But Reilly’s clownish debut on the national stage isn’t news to anyone who has followed his checkered history as a “reporter.”
Reilly formerly worked for a privately owned website that served as a Department of Justice propaganda site called Main Justice. James O’Keefe is currently suing Main Justice for publishing outright falsehoods about him. After a stint at Main Justice, Reilly moved to TPM Muckraker, where he continued to serve in the role of government mouthpiece.
Now he is at the Huffington Post.
Ryan Reilly
Among his scalps was a false report at TPM Muckraker that the election integrity organization True the Vote was under federal investigation for voter intimidation by the Justice Department, a claim which proved to be false, and a claim TPM refused to retract.
But Reilly has also published false information about others, including me. I address his falsehoods in my book Injustice: Exposing the Racial Agenda of the Obama Justice Department, a book which explains more about what is happening in Ferguson and Washington, D.C. than any report Reilly has filed so far from the field.
I note in my book Injustice:
Around this time, a left-wing blog published a false story claiming I was “fighting to testify.” To the contrary, I was afraid of the legal bind in which the subpoena had put me. The story was the fruit of an unsavory alliance between the DOJ and various left-wing blogs that became the DOJ’s mouthpiece as the Panther scandal unfolded. The “fighting to testify” story appeared on a little-read blog called Main Justice whose writers, Ryan Reilly and Mary Jacoby, obviously kept in close contact with my critics at the DOJ. Department officials would use the website to relay smears against me, Coates, and other supporters of the Panther case.
I asked for a correction to Reilly’s false story, but it never came. As such, I won’t give any interviews to him until he corrects the record.
This history has relevance to the unfolding saga in Ferguson because Reilly will be quoted and relied upon by others. Those who do should proceed with caution. You’ve been warned.
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