Righteous Indignation: Excuse Me While I Save the World! (30 page)

When people compliment me for perfectly strategizing
l’affaire Weiner
, they fail to take into account that most of Weiner’s wounds
were self-inflicted. Had he owned up to his transgression on Memorial Day weekend, when the press was asleep, we would have had a minor story with, at worst, a congressman taking a few weeks off for “sex rehab.”

But Weiner very nearly got away with it. Without further evidence except his own self-destructive interviews, the story could not move forward. For the next few days, the media began asking about PatriotUSA76 and the sources of the original story. Even though Weiner was clearly in implosion mode, the mystery of what really happened on Friday night, May 27, was still a hot topic in the blogosphere, and even in my own camp. While Lee Stranahan, Patterico (Patrick Frey), and LibertyChick (Mandy Nagy) tried to figure out who PatriotUSA76 was, I was more focused on a much bigger fish: Megan Broussard, the woman in Texas whose friend tipped us eight days before the congressman’s now-infamous tweet.

When I first spoke with Megan Broussard’s friend on Saturday, May 28, I thought that we’d have a 50 percent shot—at best—at getting her to come forward if she was, in fact, a recipient of Congressman Weiner’s lewd online offerings. When I next spoke to him, on Tuesday, May 31, we were talking for the first time against the backdrop of a full-blown media scandal. Broussard would have to make a very difficult choice about coming forward in the face of major media scrutiny. I made my pitch that I could devise a strategy that would limit her exposure. I left it to him to convince a young lady with whom I had never spoken to put her life in my hands. I was hoping he would get back to me the next day. Instead, I left multiple messages on his voice mail and sent him several e-mails. By Thursday evening, I was dejected, believing that I had lost my potential big catch.

On the one-week anniversary of Weinergate, late Friday
afternoon in Los Angeles, I received a text from a Texas number. It was Megan Broussard. And in very few keystrokes, she conveyed that she was ready to come forward. Within moments, I was on the phone with her, and before I knew it, she e-mailed me a series of photographs that I knew was going to take the story to the next level.

Pause: because I was so desirous to convince Megan to come forward with the story and the photos, I wanted to make sure that the transaction happened as quickly as possible when she matter-of-factly sent off five images, one of which was beyond damning, far beyond the one he had tweeted to the girl in Seattle. After getting off the call with her, I raced upstairs from the sidewalk in front of my office so that I could share the bounty with Joel Pollak (who is now the editor-in-chief of
Breitbart.com
). I brought up the most offending shot into my iPad e-mail reader and placed it against the glass pane of Joel’s office door. When he noticed that I was standing there, and he focused on the photo, we simultaneously (don’t get the wrong idea…) had a once-in-a-lifetime laugh that also lightened the pressure of the past week. We weren’t just having a laugh at Weiner’s expense. We just knew, implicitly, that we had our man—and that we had beaten the media again.

One week before, this unexpected journey had begun, had consumed a holiday weekend, and had built up into the biggest media frenzy of my professional career. This next weekend was setting up to be a strategic opportunity to end the story once and for all. While the drip-drip strategy worked well with ACORN, not every story is best served by delivering the story one excruciating bit of information at a time. In fact, the tactic can get old if overused. But these photos were destined to be released one at a time—not over a series of days, but over a series of hours, starting Monday morning. We’d start with the shock announcement that a second
woman had come forth who had a series of online communications, including intimate and graphic photographs. After whetting the media’s appetite, I strategized publishing the least offensive shot through the second-most offensive shot throughout Monday morning. The second part of the strategy was to reach out to ABC News. Yes—
that
ABC News, which had acquiesced to radical left-wing pressure to get me kicked off of Election Night coverage in November 2010. Why them? To send a message—not just to
ColorofChange.com
, but to ABC News as a whole—that they hadn’t defeated me.

I had promised Broussard that I would devise a strategy to interject her into the story and pull her out before the media jackals could pick her apart. The way to get her story out there with as much credibility as possible was to have ABC News reporter Chris Cuomo interview her and scrutinize her story and her photos. In turn, ABC News would be granting its imprimatur to our story. We’d drop the story of the existence of Megan Broussard and her photos (all except for one) on Monday, and ABC News would have an exclusive interview on Tuesday with the attractive single mom who would be sealing Congressman Weiner’s political fate.

On Sunday night, from Ashville, North Carolina, where I was preparing for a Monday morning speech, I contacted Fox News’s Sean Hannity to offer him a cable news exclusive. Broussard would do two television interviews and then return to Texas to live her life.

And it worked. Knowing what so many women accusers went through when they came forward to corroborate Paula Jones’s woeful story with Bill Clinton, I promised Ms. Broussard that she would be protected from a similar fate. On Monday morning, I woke up in North Carolina and gave a speech at a breakfast meeting, then returned to my iPad to confirm that we had already posted two of
the offending shots. One featured the congressman in his office holding a sign that read “Me,” in which he was trying to convey to Ms. Broussard that she was, in fact, in communication with the real Anthony Weiner. The second photo, entitled “Pussies.jpg,” featured Weiner sitting next to two longhaired cats and looking at the camera with a “come hither” look.

As I headed to the airport to board a flight to New York, where I had planned to appear on
Hannity
, I gave the directive to put up the second-to-last photo. We would state that we did not intend to make the last photograph public because of its raw, prurient nature. We felt that the next-to-last photo was more than enough to put the congressman, his staff, and his Democratic compatriots in a state of frenzy. The photo showed Weiner from the eyes down to his waist, shirtless and in full muscle-man pose, sitting at his home desk, staring creepily into the camera. Behind him, over his right shoulder, was a photo of him embracing his wife; over the other shoulder was a picture of Weiner with former president Clinton. The photo reminded me, quite obviously, of the scene in
Animal House
in which a tiny devil perched on Pinto’s shoulder tempted him to molest a passed-out and drunk teenager, while an angel on his other shoulder tried to convince him otherwise. For the duration of the one-hour-plus trip, I was writhing over the fact that I couldn’t hyper-reload the comments section from the Big Government post featuring this explosive new photo. I knew that I was performing Chinese water torture on Congressman Weiner and his allies, but I also knew that for one brief moment in my controversial media life, I was hand-feeding the media beast special cheese, fudge, and the richest delicacy they could possibly consume.

Before I landed, my phone was ringing with media requests (yes, flight attendants, I stealthily refused to turn it off in flight). Upon
landing, my voice mail was full. The walk from the commuter plane through the airport into a cab and onward into midtown Manhattan was a rush of communication with the top producers of every major network and cable news program. Being perversely curious, I asked every single one of them, “So, what do you think?” None could contain their glee. They may all be partisan hacks, but the story had become a once-in-a-lifetime perfect storm where the subject, the topic, the circumstances, and all the peripherals added up to pure media ecstasy. Now everyone was riveted and consumed.

I spoke to WCBS’s Marcia Kramer—the reporter who only four days before had been forced by police to leave Weiner’s office—and made a commitment to meet her. For a brief moment in time, I felt a sense of comradeship with her and with CNN’s Bash and Barrett. We were the ones who dared challenge the arrogant and lying congressman. Now we were set for some serious vindication. Kramer and I had arranged to meet at my hotel, the Crowne Plaza, at Forty-Ninth and Broadway. But when I arrived, she was nowhere to be found. I checked my e-mail and discovered that she had told me she had to head to the Sheraton at Fifty-Third Street and Seventh Avenue, where Congressman Weiner had announced an emergency press conference. I had stayed at that hotel just a few short months before, and knew it was less than five blocks away. I didn’t have to think about it. I just started walking there.

On the way, I started to think,
Do I want to confront him on his lies, and the fact that he made it about me?
About midway through the brief walk, I called my office and reached Larry Solov, my Dr. Gonzo, but instead of getting a pep talk, my naturally careful partner-in-crime was looking for assurances that I had nothing up my sleeve. He asked me to keep a low profile. I told him, “I swear to God I’m not planning on doing anything. Do we know what he’s
going to say?” Larry had heard rumblings that Weiner was going to admit partial culpability but try to hold on to his seat in Congress. I figured that as long as he finally came clean, my place in the press gaggle as he spoke at the podium was only going to be as an observer. If he planned to continue his obfuscation—then, I mused, I’d throw him a question or two.

Upon entering the ballroom where the press conference was being held, I had one existential goal: find an electrical outlet for my BlackBerry. It had been working overtime and had dipped into the deepest red zone. Without it, I was screwed. So I slinked into the room, as much as someone with my personality and body type can slink. I walked underneath a row of cameras on tripods in the back of the room and aimed at the podium. There were hundreds of reporters there. It was media pandemonium, as I had imagined it. In the back corner, I found what I was looking for and plugged the BlackBerry in.

When I turned around, quite miraculously, I was surrounded by at least a dozen reporters, who started to pepper me with questions. Ever since Memorial Day weekend, I had been fighting a vicious throat cough. My voice was shot, and I had trouble projecting it. The rest of the press, which had staked out the best seating and placement, were now begging me to go onstage to answer their questions, utilizing the microphone and the podium. I awkwardly began to approach the stage while simultaneously asking the reporters, “Is it okay if I go up on the stage? I’m not paying for this thing. Would it be rude?” I got the sense that everybody wanted me to get up there, and that I was playing it too coy.

One demonstrative voice was that of Marcia Kramer. In the movie, she will be the one standing there, directing me: “Get. Up. On. That. Stage.”

The thirteen-plus minutes that I spent answering questions—many of which were hostile toward me—were, as a matter of fact, unintimidating. I had been hoping that if I got lucky, the gathered press would include my quotes in the Weiner press conference footnotes. Maybe a cable network would pick up a line or two. I expected my team to post the entire video and assumed we would have to chide the media for not covering my remarks. So when I left the stage, I made a beeline for my phone, hoping that it would now be in multiple-bar, charged territory. The ringer was silenced, but I could see that ABC News producer Chris Vlasto was calling. He was producing the Broussard segment with Cuomo. Vlasto was beside himself. “Why did you do that? Why did you do that? Now Weiner’s not going to do his press conference,” he bellowed.

“What are you talking about?” I asked.

“There’s no way he’s going to go on the stage now.”

“Why?”

“You just hijacked his press conference,” Vlasto said.

“What do you mean? I just answered a few questions. They asked me to go up there and answer some questions.”

“Andrew—they cut to you. That went out live on TV,” he told me.

“Are you kidding me?”

Call-waiting: the Sean Hannity show. “Hello?”

“Sean wants you on the air.
Now
.”

The room was so loud that I had to go out through the hallway and onto the roof, which was accessible only to hotel staff. As I began to speak to Sean on the air, my phone was being bombarded with call-waitings from every media outlet known to humankind. The ABC News producer could not have been more wrong. This was a pinnacle—for me, personally, and for our company as well, after an excruciatingly hard-fought two-year period. It was the
serendipitous elevation of my righteous indignation and my mirth, wrapped into a surreal and extravagant media moment that was redemptive on every conceivable level, after a year of my integrity and veracity being challenged by the media and the political class.

After getting off Hannity’s radio show, I did a brief on-air interview by phone with Fox News’s Eric Sean, and then caught word that Weiner had finally taken the stage—fifteen minutes late. (I believe I set a precedent: no major figure will be late to an announced live press conference ever again.)

I slinked back into the room to hear Weiner’s statements. If he was standing at home plate, I was the third baseman. I was, at most, forty feet away from him. And it was clear that he was taking responsibility for his actions for the first time. He had been lying through his teeth for well over a week, and through our truthful reporting, diligence, and well-executed strategy, we put him in this position. Yet when I saw him welling up, I was strangely and completely sympathetic to the man, at least for a few minutes. Even though he and his allies had one escape strategy—to destroy me with lies in a relentless propaganda war—I still couldn’t help but cringe for his burden. But he kept talking, and talking, and talking, as if he either had the worst media strategist in the world or he was not unlike me: he likes to hear himself speak. Perhaps that was why I sympathized with him.