Righteous Indignation: Excuse Me While I Save the World! (29 page)

In fact, it was Larry Solov—a central part of Breitbart and the Bigs, but not usually an editorial force—who remembered and forwarded the tip in the midst of our conference call. I knew then that
the key to the story was getting to the bottom of that tip. So I got off the conference call while it was in progress, and left a message for the person in Texas at the phone number he had provided. I knew that I had to keep trying to get hold of him. I also knew I was calling him at an inappropriate hour—sometime between 11:00 and midnight, Texas time—but I didn’t care. This was that important. In the end, I didn’t reach him until Saturday morning—whereupon he told me he was going to be out of communication until Tuesday. So whatever evidence he had would have to wait. The woman in Texas was the key to blowing the story wide open, and the fact that she existed would remain in the back of my mind for days. But we had to press on without her.

Back on the conference call, we had confirmed, through a congressional Twitter archive service (TweetCongress), that the tweet had, in fact, come from Weiner’s official account. Coupled with what we already knew and had witnessed—the online cleansing by Weiner and the intended recipient—we felt strongly that in a fair and just media, we had enough to report our story. But given the “it’s just about the sex” narrative that the Democrat-Media Complex used to extricate Clinton from his extracurricular legal peril, we knew that we would be wrongly accused of obsessing over a congressman’s private life. We had to fret no more over that tired and hypocritical tactic when Congressman Weiner tweeted during our conference call: “TiVo shot. FB hacked. Is my blender gonna attack me next? #TheToasterIsVeryLoyal.”

Hours after what we perceived to be a private, direct message tweet turned accidental public tweet, Weiner had returned to the scene of the “crime” to attempt to clean up his mess further. But by alleging that a federal crime had been committed against a powerful member of the House of Representatives, the congressman had inadvertently trapped himself. We now
knew
we could run the
story and that there was nothing the Huffington Post, the Daily Kos, and Media Matters could do about it.

Our conference call had been going on for hours now. Big Journalism editor Dana Loesch, who was packing her bags, started typing out the story. I offered the title, “Weinergate: Congressman Claims ‘Facebook Hacked’ As Lewd Photo Hits Twitter,” and the first sentence: “Hacked—or Hung?” The congressman had put himself in quite a pickle.

The next twenty-four hours—even though it was Saturday of a Memorial Day weekend—were going to be critical. We knew that the organized left was going to wage war, and by the time I woke up the next day, after launching the story, I realized that the Democrat-Media Complex was playing for keeps. For starters, the Daily Kos, the proto–Huffington Post whose founder, Markos Moulitsas, is still granted
Meet the Press
airtime, published a post immediately declaring war on me. Without bothering to investigate the veracity of our allegations, the Kos post simply
declared
: “Breitbart to use SEX SMEAR on Rep. Anthony Weiner.” The post was later updated to accuse me of faking the photograph. (Kos, months earlier, led the charge on another Saturday morning when he tried to blame me for the shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords by the insane Jared Loughner. Within these battles against prominent Internet lefties, there are no repercussions when their side lies, cheats, and attacks. How could Kos get away with publishing a declaration of war, without having the facts, even after having been proven so egregiously wrong in trying to connect a political enemy to the despicable behavior of a lone, crazed gunman? As Dennis Prager often says, being a liberal means never having to say you’re sorry.)

So Saturday was spent at war on Twitter with hundreds of prominent left-wing activists desperately trying to turn the narrative away from Rep. Weiner and against me. Dana Loesch was on her
flight already, and the rest of my staff was monitoring the situation, looking for new evidence that might emerge and fending off the Kos-fueled attack. By the end of Saturday, whether I liked it or not, the narrative became Breitbart vs. Weiner.

In my own home, I was trying to tell my wife why I was singularly focused, and why this was not going to be an ordinary Memorial Day weekend. Susie asked if we could still travel to Palm Springs. Not wanting to disappoint everyone, I made hopeful assurances that the story would not interfere with family fun.

The two-and-a-half-hour drive on Sunday foretold the essence of the vacation: that’s your daddy’s body, but he is not here with us. While driving, I tried to honor a “no business phone calls” policy, but when Mediaite, a major media analysis website, took the Kos bait and delivered a scathing article making the Weiner story an attack on my credibility, I was forced to defend myself. Even though I was 100 percent convinced that our story was correct and that we had the potential to bury Weiner with a second possible “dick pic” recipient, I knew that the collective media attacks could draw attention away from Weiner’s culpability and make the story DOA the morning after Memorial Day. Not only had Mediaite attacked me, but
Salon.com
entered the fray—its editor, Joan Walsh, falsely accused me of “savaging” the young coed in Seattle who was the intended recipient of Congressman Weiner’s errant tweet. In fact, we had made the decision in that painstaking and elongated conference call the night before to leave the girl’s identity out of the story. Our prediction—that the media would try to make it appear that we were attacking an innocent woman—came true. But we never could have imagined that the left’s desperation would become so great that someone as high up in the left media food chain as Walsh would brazenly lie about something so provably false. (To this day, she has not yet apologized or retracted that
statement, though she remains a permanent critic, ironically challenging my journalistic integrity.)

There were two low points in Palm Springs that spoke to how much pressure was building up. One was when someone on Twitter—a Hollywood producer, I would later find out—apparently saw me walking through the resort, talking frantically on the phone. He tweeted something to the effect of “Hey Breitbart, listen to your kids and get off the phone!” I reflexively re-tweeted that “attack”—my way of dismissing its effectiveness—but he hit me dead-on. The second moment of antibliss came as I was walking with our neighbors and my wife up a scenic desert mountain trail. The understood value of the moment was the serenity and the beauty for the other five—yet I had to take an emergency phone call from an editor at an online publication who declared that he was going to ruin me over what he apparently considered false information about Anthony Weiner.

On day two of the Weiner scandal, conspiracy theories were building steam suggesting that there had in fact been a hacker, or hackers. One such theory was that PatriotUSA76—the still-unnamed person who drew my attention to Weiner’s errant tweet—was the alleged hacker. The second one, which was started by the Daily Kos and took on a life of its own, became the narrative Congressman Weiner was hoping would stick—namely, that
I
was the alleged hacker. While I was screaming back into the phone, amid picturesque cacti and red, rocky terrain, I put the phone on mute and looked at my wife and friends and emphatically told them: “I have no choice. I apologize profusely. I’m fighting for my media life.” At one point, I tried to explain to the other two husbands what was going on. “Have you ever heard of Congressman Anthony Weiner?” I asked. Both had a passing knowledge of his existence. “Well, I’m in the middle of breaking a story that will be
huge, if I can just get past Memorial Day and into the real news cycle.”

A source who had told me on Friday night that Weiner’s staffers were called to Capitol Hill for an emergency meeting informed me in the middle of this kinetic weekend that Weiner’s strategy would be to “turn on you, and make it so that the story is neutered by Tuesday.” His friends in the Netroots left—from Kos up the food chain through ThinkProgress, Media Matters,
Salon.com
, and the Huffington Post—fought valiantly throughout the weekend, but I believe we beat them on Saturday on Twitter, where we pounded Weiner over the fact that he had claimed he had been hacked, yet he showed zero desire to open an official investigation into that extremely serious allegation. The left could attack me all they wanted, but Weiner wanted it both ways: he wanted to pin the blame on a nefarious partisan trying to take him down, but he also wanted the whole story to go away without a serious investigation into who that villain was.

While I was positive that we had reported the story 100 percent accurately, I knew that the press would be unforgiving toward me if Weiner had, in fact, been hacked. Come day three of Weinergate, I traveled home from Palm Springs and stopped at a Ruby’s Grill. There, I found out that Weiner stepped back from his dangling hacking accusation when he downplayed the emerging scandal as a prank. The acute fear that had tormented my time in Palm Springs was 90 percent alleviated at that moment. At the same moment, I had learned that a friend from Tulane had died over the weekend. He was a vibrant, adventurous guy who had been skin-diving, and drowned after he was caught in kelp. It was the second time in my life that I heard bad news about a friend at a critical moment; before my first book,
Hollywood, Interrupted
, was released, I had learned that another friend had died in a construction accident. It
was a reminder that these battles at the highest levels of the media, however invigorating and frustrating they may be, are punctured by the cold, hard reality of life and death.

Nevertheless, after implying the need for a formal investigation throughout the weekend, Rep. Weiner had answered our mystery. He did not want his lies to face the scrutiny of formal testimony. Not only did I sense that we were moving out of harm’s way, but I could also immediately sense that the Netroots and other traditional allies to politicians like Weiner didn’t want to continue treading water for a man running out of alibis.

My basic attitude toward the press is that it is a toxic mix of deeply ideological and partisan leftists who are skeptical of my very existence. But I treat every individual reporter as innocent until proven guilty. It appeared early on that CNN’s Dana Bash—of whom I had no opinion, positive or negative—was ahead of the mainstream media curve in a serious way. If the mainstream media were to consider this story as being as serious as I thought it was, Tuesday would be a critical day to push the narrative away from me and back onto a congressman who was now only digging his hole deeper. I spoke to Bash and clued her in to everything we knew.

So as the weekend ended, I felt we had some wind in our sails. I had two questions on my mind: first, would the media come back from vacation and give this emerging megascandal the airtime it was due; and second, how soon could I find the woman in Texas to whom Weiner had apparently sent more photographs? On Capitol Hill that afternoon, Weiner address an impromptu press conference where he had intended to pivot to talking about a vote in the House of Representatives to raise the debt ceiling. It was his attempt to get beyond the story by once again donning the mantle of partisan warrior, in which he was often very effective. But one
thing that was missed by most, and which foretold that Weiner’s days in Congress were numbered, was that aside from scandal-plagued congressman Charles Rangel, no prominent Democrats, aside from his mentor, Sen. Charles Schumer, were coming to his defense. This was not going to be Clinton redux. When he faced the gaggle of reporters, Weiner, whose value to the Democratic Party was that he was a media attack dog who used his Brooklyn base to wage partisan warfare from the set of MSNBC in nearby Manhattan, seemed to believe that media bias would be his Kevlar vest and that he could say whatever he wanted, no matter how absurd or offensive. Weiner’s reality check came in a volley with CNN’s Bash, who clearly was not having any of the congressman’s obfuscations and misdirections.

If I felt that the storm had cleared when Weiner downgraded from “hack” to “prank,” I sensed my first feelings of elation when Weiner called Bash’s producer, Ted Barrett, a jackass for asking the most basic of follow-up questions. While Rep. Weiner made many incredibly stupid rookie mistakes, none sealed his fate more firmly than his decision to attack a journalist for doing his job. Now the rest of the media was starting to experience Weiner’s blame-the-messenger strategy. It was a tactical error Weiner probably regrets as much as his decision to tweet a bulging gray underwear pic to a girl in Seattle.

By Wednesday, the story had become a full-scale media circus. Weinergate was now seemingly out of my hands. Realizing that the press was now turning on him for his attack on CNN, Rep. Weiner was forced to expose himself to full media scrutiny. He appeared twice on MSNBC and sat down for interviews with Bret Baier of Fox News and Wolf Blitzer of CNN. From one hour to the next, Weiner seemed to be backing away from his initial claim that the gray underwear picture was not of him, even though he still
insisted he had not sent the original offending tweet. He continued to insist that a private investigation by a law firm he had hired would get to the bottom of the apparent mystery and satisfy the public’s desire to know what happened. (Even Jon Stewart, an old friend of Weiner’s, would mock him later that evening for his newfound uncertainty.) Blitzer was typically sympathetic to the liberal stalwart as he pleaded his case, and he allowed Weiner to continue to support the left’s theory that someone—namely, me—had committed a crime. He told Baier: “I know for a fact that my account was hacked.”

But by now, Weiner was in full meltdown. From his “jackass” debacle in the Capitol, right through Wednesday’s dissembling appearances, Weiner thought he could appeal to his natural allies using his glib, fast-talking, made-for-television persona. He even seemed to think he could tell them what questions to ask, and when to stop asking. On Thursday, Weiner announced that he was done talking about the scandal. But he didn’t realize, as I had, that the media was turning on him. When Marcia Kramer of CBS’s New York affiliate turned up at Weiner’s office to ask for an interview—after he had shunned local news for the national networks—Weiner’s office called the Capitol Police to escort her out. (It was a mistake that would come back to haunt him a few days later.) And fellow Democrats, many of whom had long resented his camera hogging, were furious that he had let Weinergate swallow a week in which they had hoped to demagogue Republicans on Medicare and other talking points. Without his pals the Clintons and the Democratic leadership standing by him, it was becoming clear Weiner was a political dead man walking. Even Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid wasn’t taking his calls.