Back in May, Matt wrote about Ed Butowsky’s alleged role in a story about murdered DNC staffer Seth Rich. Basically, Butowsky was said to have funded a private investigation whose end result was claiming Rich had leaked all those DNC emails to Wikileaks and then was killed for it. Crazy, right? I mean, like 2007 crazy. Not 2017 crazy.
Today, it got maybe 5 percent crazier:
Private investigator Rod Wheeler sued the cable-TV network in federal court on Tuesday, alleging it falsely quoted him in an article saying slain DNC staffer Seth Rich had contact with Julian Assange’s rogue publishing operation. Wheeler accuses Fox News regular and pro-Trump money manager Ed Butowsky of coordinating between the channel and the White House in an effort to frame Rich for the leaks and imply Democrats had a hand in his death. Fox News later retracted the article, saying it didn’t meet its “standards.”
The White House and Fox’s motivation to push the false story was to “lift the cloud” of the Russia investigation, Wheeler claims in the lawsuit. (Trump fired FBI Director James Comey a week before the article was published.) “One of the big conclusions we need to draw from this is that the Russians did not hack our computer systems and ste[a]l emails and there was no collusion like [t]rump with the Russians,” Butowsky allegedly wrote in emails to Fox News producers and anchors promoting the piece.
Wheeler’s lawsuit includes screenshots of text messages with Butowsky, including an exchange two days before the article was published in which Butowsky wrote: “president [Trump] just read the article. He wants the article out immediately. It’s now all up to you. But don’t feel the pressure.”
If you click the first link up top, you’ll see I did a short profile of Butowsky back in 2009. I wasn’t pleased with it then — things he told me almost immediately came into question; my fault, really — and every year that goes by I end up regretting doing it more and more.
UPDATE:
Because why not, here is a statement from Fox News president of news Jay Wallace that I got on my personal email address for some reason:
“The accusation that FoxNews.com published Malia Zimmerman’s story to help detract from coverage of the Russia collusion issue is completely erroneous. The retraction of this story is still being investigated internally and we have no evidence that Rod Wheeler was misquoted by Zimmerman. Additionally, FOX News vehemently denies the race discrimination claims in the lawsuit — the dispute between Zimmerman and Rod Wheeler has nothing to do with race.”
