WND's Deceptive Court Filing In Esquire Lawsuit
Topic: WorldNetDaily

A March 1 WorldNetDaily article begins:

Esquire magazine and its publisher, Hearst, lied to federal courts in their defense of a blog post falsely reporting that WND’s book on President Obama’s constitutional eligibility for office was being scrapped, charges attorney Larry Klayman.

But it seems that Klayman and WND are the ones who are lying. The crux of the issue, as explained in the article:

Klayman has filed a motion with the D.C. Circuit federal appeals court to throw out Esquire’s pleadings and end the case in WND’s favor. He notes that Esquire, in its briefs to the lower court in D.C. and now to the appeals court, claims the blog post had “tags” that would indicate to readers that its article was satirical and not a serious news story.

But Klayman contends the original article, which prompted a flood of response to WND by concerned readers and other media who took it seriously, had no such tags.

He has submitted to the court screen shots of the article taken the day it was published accompanied by an affidavit from Farah testifying there were no tags.

Since the article was published, Esquire has inserted below it a list of hyperlinked “tags,” or related article categories. The list in small, faint type consists of key words and phrases, including “Where’s the Birth Certificate,” “Jerome Corsi,” “Birthers” and “Humor.”

“They lied about what was originally published,” Klayman told WND. “They lied to the lower court, and now they’ve lied to the appellate court.”

But the screen shots Klayman has submitted have been edited to remove the section that would contain the tags.

Here's one of the two screen shots Klayman submitted:

Note that the bottom of it is cropped to conform to the end of the blog post's text. But the blog's subject tags appear after the end of the post -- and after where WND has cut off its screen shots.

A copy of the blog post in the Internet Archive dated May 19, 2011, a day after the post first appeared -- which reproduces the formatting and layout of the blog used at the time -- shows the location of the tags and other social media promotional buttons after the end of the post:

This also discredits another claim Klayman and WND make, that  the tags are "in small, faint type." The tags now appear in "faint" type, but at the time of the original post, they were in red type.

Further, neither Klayman's filing (which reveals Klayman's incompetence through its note that "A previous version of this motion was inadvertently filed without the exhibits to Mr. Farah's affidavit attached") nor WND's article address the key reason that the lawsuit had been dismissed: Farah, in the judge's words, "immediately recognized the satiric nature of the Blog Post," as demonstrated by his public statements following the initial posting, until it "became inconvenient" for him to do so.

So, look for this motion to be tossed out of court even quicker than the original lawsuit. We may even get to see Klayman be sanctioned for deliberately introducing fraudulent evidence in a court of law.