Democrats are now using their power in congress to target another one of their enemies: Fox News.
Rep Elijah Cummings (D-MD), chairman of the House Oversight Committee, is now requesting a former Fox News reporter appear before his committee to testify about how the media outlet allegedly spiked her story that would damage then-candidate Donald Trump just before the election. The former reporter, Diana Falzone, was recently featured in a New Yorker story claiming she had prepared a detail report about Trump paying porn actress Stormy Daniels to keep quiet about their affair, only to have the story spiked by Fox editors because it would hurt Trump.
As the Daily Wire previously reported, the former Fox News editor, Ken LaCorte, explained that the story was not as meticulously detailed as the New Yorker’s Jane Mayer made it seem, but rather a 9-paragraph story with little corroboration.
“It included: a two-word confirmation – ‘it’s true’ – from an unnamed Daniels ‘spokesperson,’ an anonymous quote from a friend who said she’d dropped off Daniels to meet Trump at a hotel, and quotes from [gossip website] The Dirty owner, who said that he had spoken to Daniels in 2011 and she had confirmed the affair,” LaCorte wrote of the incident.
LaCorte said the story did not mention payments, or a contract between Trump and Daniels or any other corroborating evidence. He also noted that the Daily Beast, “Good Morning America,” and Slate also passed on the story for the same reasons that he did.
In his own explanation for not running the salacious story, Slate’s Jacob Wesiberg explained that the alleged contract between Daniels and Trump was actually a document explaining pseudonyms in a document he never saw, and he couldn’t find “independent corroboration.”
Mayer did not acknowledge that other media outlets passed on the hush money story, and sent a string of false tweets claiming she did her due diligence in reporting on the incident because she spoke to LaCorte and quoted him four times. The quotes she used were not relating to the Daniels incident and LaCorte said she never asked him about it.
Cummings, seeing an opportunity to drag Fox News, is now asking Falzone to testify about her experience. It would allow her to break her Non-Disclosure Agreement she reached with Fox, according to her attorney Nancy Erika Smith.
“The law requires that you be allowed to participate in any government investigation — and no NDA can stop that,” Smith told MSNBC’s Ari Melber.
Cummings is asking Falzone for documents relating to her story and “any action taken against [Falzone] in connection with attempts to report on such stories.”
Smith also said LaCorte was lying when he told his side of the story and that he wasn’t the person who stopped Falzone’s story.
Daniels’ attorney at the time the story was written, Keith Davidson, told MSNBC that Falzone had contacted him with “specific details.”
“She had the amount, she had the corporate names that the original settlement was named in, she had the dates of the affair,” Davidson told the network, “and she asked me to confirm those details.”
An NDA might be ignored for a legitimate congressional subpoena, but its hard to see what legitimate reason Cummings has for this request other than he hates Fox News. Again, other outlets spiked the story for lacking corroboration. As LaCorte asked, why would Fox News, seen as a pro-Trump network, be the only outlet given the real information?
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