President Donald Trump called for everyone involved in the New York Times‘ story containing a “new allegation” against Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh to resign on Monday.
In a pair of tweets, Trump blasted the Times for its “smear” job and lamented the decline of the nation’s paper of record. “I call for the Resignation of everybody at The New York Times involved in the Kavanaugh SMEAR story, and while you’re at it, the Russian Witch Hunt Hoax, which is just as phony!” Trump tweeted. “They’ve taken the Old Grey Lady and broken her down, destroyed her virtue and ruined her reputation … She can never recover, and will never return to Greatness, under current Management. The Times is DEAD, long live The New York Times!” he continued.
Times botches new Kavanaugh smear
The New York Times published an article Saturday that included a “new allegation” from a former classmate, Max Stier, who claimed he once saw Kavanaugh “with his pants down at a different drunken dorm party, where friends pushed his penis into the hand of a female student.” Stier said he notified the FBI of the incident during Kavanaugh’s confirmation last year, but it was never investigated.
The article, written by reporters Robin Pogrebin and Kate Kelly, created fresh momentum, almost a year after Kavanaugh was confirmed to the SCOTUS, for Democrats to demand his impeachment. But before the weekend was over, the Times was forced to walk back its allegation after the Federalist’s Mollie Hemingway pointed out a glaring omission. Late Sunday, the paper added an editor’s note to the article, admitting that “one element” had been left out.
“The book reports that the female student declined to be interviewed and friends say that she does not recall the incident. That information has been added to the article,” the editors’ note read, in part.
The Times‘ botched story seemed to confirm what conservatives said during Kavanaugh’s confirmation last year: that the mainstream media has given up all pretenses of objectivity to smear the judge. Trump rallied to Kavanaugh’s defense in a Twitter blitz, saying he should “sue” the paper, while top Republicans Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and Lindsey Graham (R-SC) have vowed to stop an impeachment dead in its tracks.
Times embarrassed, widely criticized
Now, the most prestigious newspaper in the world is under attack by conservatives and liberals alike for its latest embarrassment. At a rally in New Mexico on Monday, Trump again attacked the Times and issued a stark warning to conservatives about what lengths the left will go to force their agenda on the country:
They will do whatever they can to demean you, to libel you. They try to blacklist, coerce, cancel or destroy anyone who gets in their way. Look at what they are doing today to Justice Kavanaugh. Kavanaugh … The woman said, I do not remember that. And they still want him to be impeached. And I just put out a statement — and he is a great man, by the way. A great talent. A great, brilliant man, Brett Kavanaugh…… Long live the New York Times. I do want it to live, but they have to change their ways.
Even MSNBC’s anti-Trump host Joe Scarborough said it “was a stunning decision to leave that central fact out of an article filled with damning accusations.” Meanwhile, the journalists who wrote the story threw their editors under the bus in an interview Monday, blaming the editing process for the fatal omission. Pogrebin said:
I think what happened actually was that we had her name and the Times doesn’t usually include the name of the victim. And so I think in this case the editors felt like maybe it was probably better to remove it. And in removing her name, they removed the other reference to the fact that she didn’t remember it.
And there’s more…
The newspaper also drew criticism over a tin-eared, since-deleted tweet promoting the Kavanaugh piece that read: “Having a penis thrust in your face at a drunken dorm party may seem like harmless fun. But when Brett Kavanaugh did it to her, Deborah Ramirez says, it confirmed that she didn’t belong at Yale in the first place.”
A Times insider told Politico that Pogrebin wrote the “neglectful” tweet, for which the paper issued a public apology:
A tweet that went out from the @NYTOpinion account yesterday was clearly inappropriate and offensive. We apologize for it and are reviewing the decision-making with those involved.
Trump, who has frequently labeled the Times “Fake News,” has consistently called out the paper for its hostile and partisan coverage, particularly on the Russia collusion story. The paper was criticized in August when a leaked internal meeting with executive editor Dean Banquet revealed that the paper was shifting its focus from Russia to writing stories about race, leading many conservatives with the impression that the Times was searching for a new narrative to attack the president after the implosion of the Russia hoax.
Not long after, the Times launched a radical project in historical revisionism — The 1619 Project — that seeks to re-frame American history as beginning with the slave trade, not with the more familiar Declaration of Independence in 1776. The Kavanaugh embarrassment is the latest example of the Times’ decline into a glorified liberal PR firm, rather than a newspaper.
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