Smackdown

Joe Lauria writes in today's Washington Post about Jason Leopold and some very shady dealings. It seems that Leopold may have pretended to be Lauria when trying to bully a story out of Mark Corallo. It is definite that someone using Lauria's name and his cell phone number, altered by a single digit, did contact Corallo repeatedly. Lauria had met with Leopold several days before Truthout's flame-out story about Rove's indictment. That meeting had been about Leopold's book, not Rove.

Three days later, Leopold's Rove story appeared. I wrote him a congratulatory e-mail, wondering how long it would be before the establishment media caught up.

But by Monday there was no announcement. No one else published the story. The blogosphere went wild. Leopold said on the radio that he would out his unnamed sources if it turned out that they were wrong or had misled him. I trawled the Internet looking for a clue to the truth. I found a blog called Talk Left, run by Jeralyn Merritt, a Colorado defense lawyer.

Merritt had called Mark Corallo, a former Justice Department spokesman who is now privately employed by Rove. She reported that Corallo said he had "never spoken with someone identifying himself as 'Jason Leopold.' He did have conversations Saturday and Sunday . . . but the caller identified himself as Joel something or other from the Londay [sic] Sunday Times. . . . At one point . . . he offered to call Joel back, and was given a cell phone number that began with 917. When he called the number back, it turned out not to be a number for Joel."

A chill went down my back. I freelance for the Sunday Times. My first name is often mistaken for Joel. My cellphone number starts with area code 917.

I called Corallo. He confirmed that my name was the one the caller had used. Moreover, the return number the caller had given him was off from mine by one digit. Corallo had never been able to reach me to find out it wasn't I who had called. He said he knew who Leopold was but had never talked to him.

Lauria has every reason to be quite angry about this. Truthout has a major problem on it's hands if they continue to stand by Leopold. If you obtain a story by lying, are you really any better than your subject?