Topic: WorldNetDaily
WorldNetDaily's Art Moore was doing so well, engaging in actual journalism at the Republican National Convention. When he got back, though, he reverted to WND form with July 31 article that played damage control for a Clinton-hating author.
That would be former Secret Service officer Gary Byrne, whose book "Crisis of Character" WND surprisingly did not publish or even carries in its online store; links top the book in Moore's article direct you to Amazon. His claim to fame is that, as Moore states, he was "posted outside the Oval Office door for three years" during the Clinton administration and has some sordid tales to tell.
Unfortunately for Byrne, the Association of Former Agents of the United States Secret Service has denounced the book as eroding the trust between the Secret Service and those it protects, and Politico has reported that critics of the book point out that Byrne, as a low-level agent, could not have firsthand knowledge of some of the things he claims in his book.
Thus, Moore's damage control efforts. Moore mentions the Politico article but refused to provide a link to it so readers can see for themselves. Instead, he gave Byrne a space to respond vaguely to critics: "I’m telling you what I saw personally, what I know is true. ... If it wasn’t true, who would put themselves at this risk and this exposure?"
Byrne also faces the accusation that some of the sordid stories he tells are different from what he testified to before independent counsel Kenneth Starr. When Buzzfeed tried to ask Byrne for an explanation of his changing stories, he hung up on them.
By the time Moore came calling, Byrne had invented an excuse for the discrepancies:
He noted that Clinton supporters went right to the testimony when the book came out and tried to compare it.
“They tried to say that I was saying stuff that I didn’t say in testimony,” Byrne told WND.
“Well, of course I did. I was answering questions to things the investigators were asking. It wasn’t my job to tell them how to do their job.
“They asked me questions about tissues, I answered about tissues.
He explained there were “so many things that happened that I had information about.”
“If they didn’t ask about those things exactly, then I couldn’t talk about it,” he said.
He said the investigation had many rules that “seemed to change by the day,” and he noted that because he was a government employee, he had no attorney-client privilege.
Note that Byrne is once again speaking vaguely about a specific allegation -- in this case, Byrne claims in his book he disposed of a stained towel, something he told Starr he didn't do.That's not a place where narrowly answering a question to prosecutors is a sufficient defense for changing one's story. Then again, Byrne claimed in a radio interview that somehow both stories were true.
Moore, however, didn't address another Byrne discrepancy that he had previously. In a June 20 WND article, Moore touted Byrne's claim to have walked in on a tryst between Bill Clinton and Eleanor Mondale, then an E! Network correspondent. But Buzzfeed noted that Byrne told Starr that he had merely heard rumors about the tryst.
Moore has apparently given up on his brief journalism career and is back to peddling dressed-up falsehoods like a good WND reporter should.
