“The Elevator Tape.”
Rumors have swirled around Washington, D.C., for some time. No one’s ever printed them, though, because, much like the “Yellow Dossier,” there’s not one bit of evidence to prove the rumors.
But the HuffPost on Thursday ran with the story. “The Hunt For ‘Every Trump Reporter’s White Whale’: The Elevator Tape,” said the headline. “All your favorite media outlets (plus Tom Arnold) are racing to find a damning tape that might not even exist,” said the subhed.
The news peg? The Daily Beast ran a story that mentions the “elevator tape.”
Here’s what the Beast said:
As the Access Hollywood fallout spread, the TMZ tip line received an email from a lawyer in Los Angeles claiming to have another bombshell tape of Trump in an elevator in Trump Tower, seven sources familiar with the matter told The Daily Beast. (The Daily Beast has uncovered no proof that the tape exists after interviews with more than a dozen former and current TMZ staffers and others with knowledge of the situation.)
The Beast lays out a complicated conspiracy theory that essentially says someone claimed to have the tape, then decided not to hand it over.
“There it was, some 1,500 words into a story published in the Daily Beast: the infamous Donald Trump elevator tape. Well, not the tape itself, but the first reference in a mainstream publication to the possible existence of a ‘bombshell tape of Trump in an elevator in Trump Tower,’ ” the HuffPost wrote.
This is, of course, how things move from rumor to mainstream. Now, the story is out there — even though no one knows a thing about the tape.
Admits the HuffPost:
The rumors vary from journalist to journalist, but the common understanding is that somewhere out there, a tape might exist of Trump doing something in an elevator, though exactly where that somewhere is and what that something might be, no one in media can say. That’s because no one in media seems to have seen the tape — or is even confident it exists.
So no one knows what’s in the tape, what Trump is supposed to have done — or even if the tape actually exists!
For months, reporters at various media outlets around the country — The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Associated Press and others — had chased a videotape that may not even exist. They had talked to people in the know and people close to the know and people like Tom Arnold, the actor, who on certain days seems to be within the know. …
One person working outside of the traditional legal confines of the media has been more explicit. Over Thanksgiving weekend of last year, Tom Arnold used Twitter to describe the rumored contents of the tape in more detail than anyone else has before or since. (We’d quote him here, but HuffPost’s legal team advised against it.) Speaking of the purported tape again a day later, Arnold wrote cryptically: “Gotta give TMZ their props. At least they tried.”
The article gets more preposterous from there.
But make no mistake: The mainstream media is moving to make this story real, to give it legs. From “actor” Tom Arnold’s Twitter feed to the Daily Beast to HuffPost. Soon to be on CNN or NBC, no doubt.