After I made a comment in a thread here saying that Jason Leopold had been accused of fabricating stories in the past, he sent me an email saying that he had never been accused of any such thing. I won’t disclose any further detail of his email, except to say that he raised the issue of redemption and second chances.
It looks like another writer had a much more difficult interaction with Mr. Leopold than I did. Joe Lauria, a freelancer who often works for the Times of London, discovered that Leopold was impersonating him in phone calls to Karl Rove’s office.
I met Leopold once, three days before his Rove story ran, to discuss his recently published memoir, “News Junkie.”…
…Three days later, Leopold’s Rove story appeared. I wrote him a congratulatory e-mail, wondering how long it would be before the establishment media caught up…
More after the flip…
But by Monday there was no announcement. No one else published the story. The blogosphere went wild. Leopold said on the radio that he would out his unnamed sources if it turned out that they were wrong or had misled him. I trawled the Internet looking for a clue to the truth. I found a blog called Talk Left, run by Jeralyn Merritt, a Colorado defense lawyer.
Merritt had called Mark Corallo, a former Justice Department spokesman who is now privately employed by Rove. She reported that Corallo said he had “never spoken with someone identifying himself as ‘Jason Leopold.’ He did have conversations Saturday and Sunday . . . but the caller identified himself as Joel something or other from the Londay [sic] Sunday Times. . . . At one point . . . he offered to call Joel back, and was given a cell phone number that began with 917. When he called the number back, it turned out not to be a number for Joel.”
A chill went down my back. I freelance for the Sunday Times. My first name is often mistaken for Joel. My cellphone number starts with area code 917.
I called Corallo. He confirmed that my name was the one the caller had used. Moreover, the return number the caller had given him was off from mine by one digit. Corallo had never been able to reach me to find out it wasn’t I who had called. He said he knew who Leopold was but had never talked to him.
I called Leopold. He gave me a profanity-filled earful, saying that he’d spoken to Corallo four times and that Corallo had called him to denounce the story after it appeared.
When he was done, I asked: “How would Corallo have gotten my phone number, one digit off?”
“Joe, I would never, ever have done something like that,” Leopold said defiantly.
I’m not going to say that it is beyond the capabilities and deviousness of Karl Rove’s operation to set Leopold up. I’m just going to say that Leopold’s credibility is shot. Everyone (well, almost everyone) deserves a second chance. Leopold appears to have blown his. In the field of journalism, it’s bad enough to get the story wrong. It’s much worse to impersonate other reporters and to make misrepresentations to sources under the guise of being someone else. That’s flatly unethical…whether you get the story or you do not.
And, if Leopold was set up, he was set up good. Because no one is going to believe him.
