OPINION - Despite TIMEly Death, Washington Star Spared NYTimes Shame, Humiliation, Downfall

Kavanaugh's Accuser Max Stier Is Former Clinton Lawyer

“If at first you don’t succeed… try, try again… at least as long as the internet traffic and potential book sales from frustrated liberals continue to hold.”

After this past weekend’s bogus “bombshell” about Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, perhaps that line should replace “All the news that is fit to print” as the new motto of the now further diminished and increasingly liberal New York Times.

The once universally respected paper of record published a bizarre opinion piece on a book by two of its reporters who investigated Kavanaugh’s past, in light of the sexual assault allegations levied against him during his intensely contentious confirmation process. The piece, which is weirdly headlined and framed as a look at the Yale University culture at the time Kavanaugh studied there, eventually reveals a “new” allegation against him. It sounds very similar to the one involving Deborah Ramirez, which the authors try mightily to resuscitate, mostly through the use of smoke and mirrors.

The story has been the talk of the internet for the past two days and its “revelations” have been widely copied and pasted by other major news outlets. However, there is absolutely nothing “new” or legitimately credible in the piece, and there are key omissions that should humiliate the Times and, in a rational world, would never have allowed the story to run as it did.

The “second” Yale allegation comes in the form of a male witness, Max Stier, who some 35 years later told investigators during Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearings that he saw the nominee put his genitals in the face of a woman on campus (importantly, Democrats in the Senate decided not to do anything with this account). There are massive problems with this allegation, however, and how the Times allowed their biased reporters to frame it.

First, according to the reporters’ own book, the alleged victim has no memory of Kavanaugh doing this to her, and yet their article does not make that at all clear. Right there, especially since the information is not new, this accusation should never have been in the Times story. (An update was added to the Times piece late Sunday night noting that the alleged victim “declined to be interviewed and friends say that she does not recall the incident.”)

Responsible journalists simply cannot allow such an explosive claim against a highly politicized figure to be levied such an incredibly long time after the alleged event when there is no known victim, and absolutely no contemporaneous account of it happening. But this is still not the worst offense against journalism in the piece.

Steir is hilariously described as a “thought-leader” who works for a D.C. non-profit. The liberal media activists on Twitter — including Ronan Farrow and Jane Mayer who first, dubiously, reported on the Ramirez episode after the Christine Ford allegation became public — gushed all over him as someone whose reputation makes him a stellar witness.

Attribution: John Ziegler, mediaite.com
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