Writers of NYT’s Hit Piece On Kavanaugh: They Included Exculpatory Information, Editors Removed It

New York Times reporters and authors of the new book entitled “The Education of Brett Kavanaugh: An Investigation,” Robin Pogrebin and Kate Kelly, appeared on Lawrence O’Donnell’s show, MSNBC’s “The Last Word,” last night to address the media storm sparked by their latest hit piece on Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. Considering O’Donnell himself was recently exposed for reporting fake news, the women certainly chose a sympathetic venue.

For anyone who may have missed this story, Pogrebin and Kelly revived the now debunked story that Kavanaugh, as an undergraduate student at Yale, had exposed himself to a freshman girl at a wild college party. They alleged that this incident had been corroborated. However, the woman, now 53, has no recollection of this episode and refuses to be interviewed. Pogrebin and Kelly wrote:

We also uncovered a previously unreported story about Mr. Kavanaugh in his freshman year that echoes Ms. Ramirez’s allegation. A classmate, Max Stier, saw Mr. Kavanaugh with his pants down at a different drunken dorm party, where friends pushed his penis into the hand of a female student.

Forced to set the record straight, The New York Times issued a correction:

An earlier version of this article, which was adapted from a forthcoming book, did not include one element of the book’s account regarding an assertion by a Yale classmate that friends of Brett Kavanaugh pushed his penis into the hand of a female student at a drunken dorm party. 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.

Pogrebin and Kelly claim that this exculpatory information was included in their original draft, and “may have been removed from the original draft in the editing process.” The Daily Caller’s Chuck Ross provided a clip from the program which aired last night. Ross writes, “Plot thickens. Robin Pogrebin and Kate Kelly claim that the qualifier about the other alleged Kavanaugh accuser not remembering an incident at Yale was included in the initial NYT draft but removed.”

Plot thickens.
Robin Pogrebin and Kate Kelly claim that the qualifier about the other alleged Kavanaugh accuser not remembering an incident at Yale was included in the initial NYT draft but removed. pic.twitter.com/p9wUTnFyM1

— Chuck Ross (@ChuckRossDC) September 17, 2019

Here are their remarks (emphasis mine):

O’Donnell: In your draft of the article, did it include those words that have since been added to the article?

Pogrebin and Kelly: It did.

O’Donnell: So somewhere in the editing process, those words were trimmed.

Pogrebin: Yeah, I think what happened actually was that, we have her name, and the Times doesn’t usually include the name of the victim. So, I think, in this case, the editors felt it was better to remove it and in removing her name, they removed the other reference to the fact that she didn’t remember it.

O’Donnell: So, in your draft for the Times, you used basically the exact words that are in the book, that deliberately left off the name, because that passage begins with the name and so, in their removal of the name, they ended up removing (inaudible). (He is abruptly cut off by Pogrebin.)

Pogrebin: The whole sentence. So I think it was just sort of an editing, you know, done in the haste in the editing process.

O’Donnell: Were you involved in the decision to amend this and do the correction – the addition online to the piece?

Pogrebin: We discussed it. We felt like there was so much heat, there’s so much – everyone has been seizing on various aspects of this that we certainly didn’t want it to be an issue anymore and we certainly never intended to mislead in any way. We wanted to give as full of a story as possible.

It’s pretty hard to buy this story. It’s impossible to know if the writers excluded the crucial information in their original draft or if they had included it and the editors removed it. But, either way, the omission of the exculpatory evidence from this story was intentional. Their goal is to inflict maximum damage on Justice Kavanaugh so that, if he ever does “take a scalpel” to Roe vs. Wade, they can use this story to discredit him.

The Democrats have been especially brutal in their coverage of the President lately. Their reporting is always negative, but recently, it seems to have become more savage than ever.

Here are several examples. Last week, CNN reported that a spy had to be extracted from Russia because Trump had been reckless with highly classified information. This news was proven false. The CIA took the unusual step of setting the record straight. Lawrence O’Donnell reported the fake news that Trump’s Deutsche Bank loans had been cosigned by Russian oligarchs, a fake story he was forced to apologize for. Based upon an irresponsible editorial in the Washington Post last week, Rachel Maddow reported that Trump is slow walking $250 million in aid to Ukraine until they agree to help him win the 2020 election by damaging Joe Biden’s campaign. House Democrats are reviving their “impeachment inquiry” that’s not really an impeachment inquiry, but an effort to obtain the grand jury information from the Mueller report. And now, the media is trying to resurrect their bogus and outrageous allegations against Justice Kavanaugh.

This avalanche of fake news smacks of desperation and it makes me wonder. Are they trying to get ahead of the release of the DOJ IG report on alleged FISA abuse, which is expected to be damning?

Readers?

The post Writers of NYT’s Hit Piece On Kavanaugh: They Included Exculpatory Information, Editors Removed It appeared first on RedState.