Tactics in this class are probably not atypical, but it’s still disappointing to see them. WaPo reports on an attempt to subvert the attorney of one of the accusers of Alabama Congressional Senate candidate Roy Moore:
Days after a woman accused U.S. Senate candidate Roy Moore of sexual impropriety, two Moore supporters approached her attorney with an unusual request.
They asked lawyer Eddie Sexton to drop the woman as a client and say publicly that he did not believe her. The damaging statement would be given to Breitbart News, then run by former White House strategist Stephen K. Bannon.
In exchange, Sexton said in recent interviews, the men offered to pay him $10,000 and promised to introduce him to Bannon and others in the nation’s capital. Parts of Sexton’s account are supported by recorded phone conversations, text messages and people in whom he confided at the time.
According to the article, this information eventually reached a federal prosecutor, who declined to pursue the matter. The article is quite long and in-depth, and it’s worth a read for a non-fictional account of how politics is sometimes conducted. By its existence, it characterizes the far-right extremists; I wonder how often the left indulges in these morally dubious practices. Go read it.
And if WaPo says your free articles are exhausted, stop supporting bad journalism and buy a subscription. Remember, free news sources are controlled by their advertisers. If you’re paying for a subscription, then at least that media source has some freedom from parties possibly hostile to the truth, which are the advertisers. That doesn’t guarantee that media source is a high quality, neutral source of news – but it removes one source of perversion of that ideal, doesn’t it?
