Who needs evidence when you have generalizations and innuendo? The New York Times, apparently.
In an article published Wednesday, the Times irresponsibly suggested that former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo may have stolen a $5,800 bottle of whiskey gifted to him by the Japanese government. The Times had zero evidence that Pompeo had anything to do with the bottle’s disappearance, or that he even ever received the gift, yet the Times attempted to smear Pompeo anyway.
The author of the article, Michael S. Schmidt, tweeted the following summary of his work:
NEW: In 2019 Japan gifted Sec State Mike Pompeo a $5,800 bottle of whiskey. Now, State says it has no idea where it went and is investigating its whereabouts. It’s against law to take gift from foreigner over $390. Pompeo says he knows nothing about bottle.
The clear implication in this tweet is that the gift was given to Pompeo (it wasn’t) and that it is now missing, making Pompeo the most likely culprit. Schmidt then accuses Pompeo of a crime before quickly adding the former secretary of state’s response.
The actual article paints a different picture while still trying to implicate Pompeo. In the second paragraph, Schmidt admits: “It was unclear whether Mr. Pompeo ever received the gift, as he was traveling in Saudi Arabia on June 24, 2019, the day that Japanese officials gave it to the State Department, according to a department filing on Wednesday in the Federal Register documenting gifts that senior American officials received in 2019.”
But using anonymous sources — “two people briefed on the inquiry” — and the State Department filing in the Federal Register, the Times wove together a story heavily implying Pompeo illegally walked out with this gift.
Pompeo’s attorney, William A. Burck, told the Times that the former secretary of state didn’t remember ever receiving any bottle of whiskey and did not know where it could possibly be. He also said Pompeo was unaware there was even an inquiry about such a bottle.
“He has no idea what the disposition was of this bottle of whiskey,” Burck told the outlet.
But the Times’ trudged on, discussing the penalties one could face for stealing such an item even though, again, they have no evidence Pompeo ever received it, let alone stole it.
The outlet then turned its attention to simply tying Pompeo to the Trump administration, which the Times loathed. It provided an editorialized and unsourced claim, “Trump administration officials routinely flouted guidelines about day-to-day government issues like record-keeping and ethics, and paperwork filed for gifts was often incomplete,” in an article presented as straight news. The Times then rehashed other allegations against Pompeo and his supposedly improper use of State Department staffers.
Even the expert the Times quoted said issues in the Trump era arose from a “mix of rules and regulations that were previously obscure and rarely invoked,” adding that he had “been doing ethics stuff for 40 years and this has never been on the top of the list or on the list of problems.”
One shouldn’t be surprised by the Times’ article. Schmidt’s bio at the end of the article lists that he was on a Times team of reporters who won a Pulitzer Prize in 2018 for “coverage of President Trump and his campaign’s ties to Russia,” a media-invented story that, like this article about Pompeo, relied on anonymous sources, innuendo, and misrepresented information in order to make allegations about Trump and his associates.