President Donald Trump personally approved a false Fox News story claiming a murdered Democratic staffer—not Russian hackers—leaked Democratic National Committee emails to WikiLeaks, a new lawsuit claims.
Private investigator Rod Wheeler sued the cable-TV network in federal court on Tuesday, alleging it falsely quoted him in an article saying slain DNC staffer Seth Rich had contact with Julian Assange’s rogue publishing operation. Wheeler accuses Fox News regular and pro-Trump money manager Ed Butowsky of coordinating between the channel and the White House in an effort to frame Rich for the leaks and imply Democrats had a hand in his death. Fox News later retracted the article, saying it didn’t meet its “standards.
The White House and Fox’s motivation to push the false story was to “lift the cloud” of the Russia investigation, Wheeler claims in the lawsuit. (Trump fired FBI Director James Comey a week before the article was published.) “One of the big conclusions we need to draw from this is that the Russians did not hack our computer systems and ste[a]l emails and there was no collusion like [T]rump with the Russians,” Butowsky allegedly wrote in emails to Fox News producers and anchors promoting the piece.
Wheeler’s lawsuit includes screenshots of text messages with Butowsky, including an exchange two days before the article was published in which Butowsky wrote: “president [Trump] just read the article. He wants the article out immediately. It’s now all up to you. But don’t feel the pressure.
A couple minutes ago I got a note that we have the full, uh, attention of the White House, on this,” Butowsky allegedly said in a voicemail that same day, according to the lawsuit. “And, tomorrow, let’s close this deal, whatever we’ve got to do. But you can feel free to say that the White House is onto this now.”
Butowsky told NPR, who first reported the lawsuit, that he was “kidding” about Trump’s supposed involvement. Outgoing press secretary Sean Spicer said in a statement that “[Butowsky] asked for a 10 minute meeting, with no specified topic, to catch up and said he would bring along a contributor to Fox News. As Ed himself has noted, he has never met the President, and the White House had nothing to do with this story.” (The day Fox News’ article went live, Spicer dodged questions about whether he’d ever been kept abreast on the Rich probe.)
Wheeler is a former homicide detective who has worked as a “Fox News crime analyst” for over a decade. In 2007, he was forced to retract a story he reported on The O’Reilly Factor in which he claimed more than 150 “violent lesbian gangs” armed with 9-millimeter handguns in the D.C. area alone were “performing sex acts” and “committing crimes.” The story was entirely unfounded, but the network never separately apologized or retracted it, and Wheeler was allowed to stay on as a contributor. That same year, he claimed to the National Enquirer that “there is a good possibility that the D.C. Madam’s list contains the name of [missing FBI intern] Chandra [Levy]’s killer!” That case remains unsolved, and Wheeler provided no further evidence.”
Fox contributor Rod Wheeler says the network fabricated his quotes...
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Originally Posted by peam
